Digital Sovereignty and the Open Internet: Can they Coexist?

1:29PM Apr 4, 2025

Speakers:

Milton Mueller

Keywords:

Digital sovereignty

open internet

global governance

state control

data localization

digital transformation

cybersecurity

surveillance capitalism

Neo-mercantilism

internet governance

digital economy

human rights

privacy protections

technological architecture

multi-stakeholder involvement.

Recording in progress my assistant, Ashley Wilson, here at the Cross center for their help in putting this event together. I would also like to thank all the panelists for dedicating the time and energy to this event. And I would like to thank Milton at the Internet Governance Project for collaborating on this issue. I think the idea to have this debate today came out of a discussion that started online in response to a couple of recent books, and we wanted to sort of use an opportunity to explore in more detail, in a rigorous way, what we mean by digital sovereignty relates to the foundational values of the open internet and where we go from here. Let me also just make a couple of logistical announcements. We have large group of people we would like to go through a first round of discussion so that every panelist has an opportunity to articulate our own view of the issue, then we have an open discussion among the panelists, but we would like to reserve about 15 minutes at the end, maybe 20 we can manage for a discussion without the audience, and we invite you to post your questions in the Q and A function. We also, if there's enough time, and this is a big if we have the opportunity to spotlight you, to let you talk on camera, if you would like to do this, please a little note into your question, and we might call on you. We'll see how the timeline works out. I think that's all we need logistically. Now, let me go to today's topic, global political and economic order that was in place by in the 1980s 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, that has really been instrumental for global posterior parity and human flourishing. It's changing. It was under strain since the financial crisis in 2008 but it's changing at a more rapid piece. This as we move to more transactional politics, as we move to one nationalist politics, and you know that order had its own problems. I'm not here to argue that it was without problems, but it also was very strongly instrumental for a lot of positive things that happened globally. Internet was, of course, an integral part that aura and develop its own not only technological architecture, but also governance architecture, largely non governmental architecture, with a lot of multi stakeholder involvement, at least in the last decade or two decades, the internet is not unaffected by these changes, and today, we would like to explore one aspect of those changes, right? There's an increasing discussion globally on various forms of digital economy or digital sovereignty, and we want to explore first of all, what do we mean? What do stakeholders mean by the notion of digital sovereignty, and how does it affect the original, foundational values of an open Internet, right? Can those two coexist, the tensions the conflicts are between those conflicts, and I'm very happy to that we have an outstanding panel of experts right who have contributed in their own ways, from different disciplinary vantage points, but also from different geographic vantage points to this discussions over the past 10 years. I will introduce them in the order of their appearance during this first round of statements, and we'll start with Anupam Chandra from Georgetown Law School, followed by perspective from Berlin, from Julio poli from the sort of Science Center Berlin. Our third speaker will be min Jean, professor of communications at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte fourth, we'll have Milton Mueller, professor at Georgia Tech University, and the director of the Internet Governance Project. And finally, close out that first round, Marie Leah Maciel, who is a director of digital trade and economic security at the deeplo Foundation. So without any more time wasted on my statement, let's just go to the first question. What do you mean? What do stakeholders mean with the notion of digital sovereignty? What are the various interpretations, and are those compatible with the notion of an foundational notions of an open Internet? And let's start with you. Anupa, please. Thank you, Johann, and

delighted to be here along with this great group of scholars. So I think the question of digital sovereignty is is generally related to the desire to control that what happens online, and so in that sense, it's the natural kind of addition or kind of growth of sovereignty itself. If you're if the government is sovereign over what happens in on the streets or in a town, maybe it should also be sovereign over what happens online involving its citizens. So I think at that broad level, it can just be understood as kind of effort to exercise control over the online directions that spill into that territory, that physical territory. Now, of course, what it also because the internet is inherently global, that involves a lot of spillover. So so the regulating an entity online might include someone it might include someone that is way outside one's shores, that's somewhere far away, and so it invites and leads to kind of jurisdictional spillovers where one government asserted itself vis a vis other, other companies, other actors across the world. And you of course, might have multiple contradictory impulses. And these are questions that have been, you know, kind of plaguing the growth of the internet from the get go China, in some sense, invented cyberspace sovereignty. Digital sovereignty by creating these digital firewalls that gave it greater control over what happened within its its domain, within the you know, its territory, and Russia has, you know, moved towards a Runet, kind of Russian sovereign space. France has, at various times, expressed an interest in the cloud sovereign, the sovereign cloud, etc. So often, in reality, this becomes an effort to say, hey, we don't like the foreign companies that are operating here, or at least, we want to bring them under our control. And so this is an effort to kind of demonstrate that and ensure that there are enough powers to make that happen.

You and your colleagues have just co edited a special issue on addressing issues of digital sovereignty for your insights. Yeah. Thank

you. First of all, also, thank you for having me. I'm really glad to join this International Panel, which I think is important to understand the different kind of perspectives on digital sovereignty. And I mean this special issue we edited in a project that we actually just launched, looking at practices, not only debates, but practice of digital sovereignty all around the world is really what is understanding, trying to understand what different countries, regions, but also different stakeholders actually mean when they speak about digital sovereignty, and to kind of get away from the original notion that we have, which is very much linked to the political concept of sovereignty, and really trying to understand what what different groups believe should be done under the label of digital sovereignty. And so I use my couple of minutes for this first question to speak about the research I've been doing myself, which is mostly about Europe and the European debate on digital sovereignty. And I think it's an interesting discussion that we're having in Europe on digital sovereignty, which, from the outside, might not reflect all the different nuances that we are seeing in the within Europe on these kind of debates in digital sovereignty. And it's really something that digital sovereignty something that came up in Europe since 2013 after the Snowden revelations, which already kind of hints to the kind of reasons why we're having this discussion, but it's also something that is kind of coming out of a more long standing debate, particularly in France as one of the main European member states, about technological sovereignty, but also about coming out of out of Germany, and some ongoing debates there in the open source community about reducing our dependencies from private tech companies. So it's something that in Europe is somehow being pushed from two different sides and two different member states of France and Germany and very different stakeholder groups to the European level. And what we can see now, over the last couple of years, it was really embraced by all political parties from the entire spectrum, from the far right to the left, and all different kind of stakeholder groups. So it's not only something being pushed by political actors and by policy makers, but it's really a concept that is being embraced by civil society, by academia, very much as well, and also by the business community. But what we see is among these, between these different stakeholder groups and different kind of political actors. Digital sovereignty in Europe means very different things to very different people. So there is no clear common understanding what it means. And if you try to kind of bring all the different understandings that we've been observing in Europe to kind of one very broad definition, I would say that within Europe, we understand digital sovereignty and as self determination, and that includes the capacity to act and to make decisions regarding the development and the use of digital technology. And so that's an understanding that is not necessarily limited to state power and to state sovereignty, but it also includes the self determination of individual users, and it includes the self determination of particular communities or groups. So it's a collective kind of self determination, but it's also includes also individual self determination. So I would say in Europe, I would argue, actually, that digital sovereignty is much less as a state centered concept that it is often assumed abroad, at least for some people. I wouldn't say that people embrace this kind of non state sovereignty idea, but it is at least very present in the European debates. And I think what is important to understand what the debate on digital sovereignty within Europe is, I would like to point to two different kind of developments that we have been seeing over the last couple of years, which also may help me to answer the question of how this idea of digital sovereignty in Europe kind of relates to the open Internet. And so I would say that the first development that we've been seeing is that why originally, when the Europe digital sovereignty idea came to the level of European policy makers, so to the Brussels levels and the total sovereignty was very much linked and motivated by economic insecurity concerns. So that means all the different kind of ideas that we normally attach to the idea of virtual sovereignty. But over the years, it develops really into a much broader vision, and not necessarily an economic one, but like really a normative or ideological vision in some way. So digital sovereignty is becoming really normally justified within Europe. It is kind of framed now. Digital sovereign is framed as a way to shape an alternative digital transformation, or maybe even an alternative digital global order, which is an alternative, first of all, to the state that digital authoritarianism coming out of China, but also an alternative to the Economy. Economy led us digital capitalism model that they have been seeing over the last 2030, years. So for Europe, I think if you really kind of want to break it down, it means that digital sovereignty is, and that's, that's I'm quoting here. It's not my words, is basically about creating a digital transformation, or shaping a digital transformation that is based on European and democratic values and on the protection of individual rights and human rights. And with this digital sovereignty, really becomes kind of this very large vision. It's supposed to kind of solve all problems that we have in the digital age, the problems of individual rights and freedoms, of collective and infrastructural security, of legal enforceability, of economic competition, and so all these problems that's kind of the idea should be solved, if he just ranks in digital sovereignty. So it almost becomes kind of a shorthand digital sovereign becomes a short term for an ordered, regulated and rule based digital sphere. So in that way, I think it's interesting how it relates to the open Internet. Because I mean how it is, if this is compatible with the open ended really meant, depends on how you define the open Internet. But in some way these ideas that kind of underlie digital sovereignty discourse in Europe, democracy, human rights, individual rights, user rights, rule based and so on. Some of them are very much compatible with the original ideas, but some of them, of course, are not. So I would say it's, it really depends on how you define the open Internet. But I would also like to point to a second development we've been seeing over the last couple of years, which I personally find much more problematic, and that's its Europe starts to kind of externalize its digital sovereignty ambitions. So while it originally was really about Europe strengthening its digital sovereignty itself, determination. So it was about the European Digital market. It was about the European industry. It was about und state, compacities, European uses now Europe, when the European Commission in particular, kind of starts to project this vision to the outside world. So it kind of wants to to expand digital sovereignty efforts. And this this kind of vision for an alternative digital transformation, also to other parts of the world. And this is problematic in in my opinion, because it kind of fuels digital sovereignty efforts in countries that might not share the European vision that is based on democracy, human rights, individual rights, and so on. And also kind of create some kind of normative expansionism So Europe bringing kind of its own ideas and values to countries in the Global South, and that is very much not in line with the original digital sovereignty idea that Europe is actually trying to kind of bring to the world. So I think there is kind of an internal contradiction in what they're doing there. And this is for my opinion, in my opinion, the much more problematic development.

Thank you. Let's now go to min in North Carolina, and you have just co edited with Luca Bay a book on digital sovereignty in the countries and developed a kind of a rich Apology of terms that I use so please. Thank you.

Thank you, Johannes and Milton for organizing this discussion, and many thanks to the remarks made by Anupam and Julia to pick up where Julia left off, I want to acknowledge that sovereignty itself is a very much debated concept, rather than a settled one. Although sovereignty is often associated with the nation state, something that undergirds the international system, as well as disciplines such as international law, international relations, a state centric approach to sovereignty is far from being the only one nation states, in fact, do not have a monopoly over the meanings and practices of digital sovereignty. One doesn't really have to go far back in history to recognize that. For example, John Stuart Mill vehemently defended the sovereignty of the individual in his book on liberty by arguing that the individual is sovereign over himself, over his words and mine, body and mind. Last year, Edward Snowden, of all people, also publicly defended individual digital sovereignty against state and corporate surveillance and intrusions. My co editor, Luca Belli and I and the group of authors who contributed to the book project Digital sovereignty in the birth countries, recently published by Cambridge University Press in open access format, we recognize that there are diverse approaches to sovereignty, rather than universal consensus, in the book, we try to rethink this classical concept of sovereignty in the digital age. In the end, we compiled and put together seven perspectives, from the more familiar state digital sovereignty to the less familiar post colonial digital sovereignty. Our goal for the book was not and is not to impose a single perspective, but to create at least a space to debate about these perspectives. So far we have touched upon somewhat. You know, to some extent, State Digital sovereignty, super National Digital sovereignty, for example, in the EU case and comments and personal digital sovereignty, personal digital sovereignty, let me say a few words also about two other perspectives. Corporations are typically not thought to be, you know, state actors, of course, and they are not supposed to have claim to political power. Yet, the big tech, especially the ones from and based in the United States, are deeply embedded in national international politics, from state sanctions global surveillance to their debacles in the national elections to their failed responses to ethnic violence. For instance, in Myanmar a few years ago, they adjudicate national online speeches and acts in a manner as if they were sovereign states. Amazon, for example, also extracts fees north of 50% from sellers, similar to taxation right big tech dictates digital infrastructure, data services and protocols in many important ways on top of an open and interoperable internet, given the immense power they will often more than small states online. So I think we cannot help but ask, who are the digital sovereigns and digital subjects today? Some scholars call this form of capitalism surveillance capitalism. Others describe the dynamics in colonial terms, comparing the endless extraction of user data, especially from global south countries for profit, to the colonial era where European powers used sovereignty as a legal instrument to take ownership and possession of supposedly un owned lands, so digital terra nullius and data colonialism are precisely the target of criticism by a lot of post colonial and indigenous scholars and activists who have been advocating for indigenous sovereignty as well as indigenous data rights and data sovereignty for decades. We call this perspective post colonial digital sovereignty. Of course, there are many more, but in the interest of time, I will stop here, but we'll pick up the discussion about free and open Internet a bit later. Thank you.

Thank you, and now I'm on to you. Milton, good

to be here, everybody. This is a great crew of and you're getting a very well rounded discussion of this controversial issue of digital sovereignty. I just want to say that you got to go back to the fundamentals here. The problem, the entire problem of internet governance, has, from the beginning, fundamentally been about a clash or tension between a globalized cyberspace that was created by this open, non proprietary technical protocol and territorial sovereignty that has been The overriding issue from the beginning, and it still really is. Let's talk about the formation of ICANN, which was based on the global framework for electronic commerce promulgated by the Clinton Gore administration. That basically said, We don't want sovereign governance of the internet. We don't want governments to be involved. We want to have a globalized, a fully globalized, contractual regime. So we created a non state actor to govern the DNS registry, and then we went into the World Summit on the Information Society. And what was that about? Well, that was a bunch of governments waking up and saying, Hey, we don't have any control, or the amount of control we would like to have over the internet. And what is happening here with this private actor making policy decisions, if you remember the Tunis Agenda and most of the wissus battle was about two things. One of them was the assertion by states that they had the power to make international internet policy, and that was a sovereign right. And the other was about the fact that one sovereign United States was in control of ICANN, and this was perceived quite correctly as a deviation from the principle of sovereign equality that was supposed to rule international institutions. So we have to recognize that when we created ICANN, we institutionalized a non sovereign form of governance over the Internet registries, not, of course, over the entire every aspect of the internet. So I have, we have to say that the, from the beginning, the notion of sovereignty has been floated or advanced as a way of being a reaction against this globalized governance regime in which the internet community governs itself, and it's extremely disingenuous, I think, for people to sort of avoid that and talk about all the different things people mean by sovereignty. I'll get into the definitional questions later, but we have to realize that, yes, fundamentally, the sovereignty issue in cyberspace is a clash between internet community self governance and state centric multilateral governance as a way of achieving Some kind of global rule system. And so it's my assertion that the open, global internet cannot exist with efforts to assert digital sovereignty. Sovereignty by definition, almost any definition, is an exclusivity

of power, right? So, but

one way to look at digital sovereignty in a way that, yes, departs from the classical state centric definition, is to look at it as a discursive resource that is employed by actors in a context of political struggles over the control of digital networks. And I think that that's definitely what's happening. That's why you see so many different definitions. That's why you see Julia telling us that, oh, it's kind of about a broad vision of digital transformation in Europe, and that, you know, essentially, Julia is saying that digital sovereignty is all good things about the digital world. It involves rights and freedom and good rules, rule based orders. But really, why is the word sovereignty in there? Then you're just talking about digital governance, right? And we all could probably come to some kinds of normative agreements about what we want from digital governance, and we can have lots of debates about the role of the big tech companies, about the role of the market versus the role of the state, but again, are you talking about global governance, or are you talking about territorial governance? And if you're not talking about territorial governance, if you're not talking about Europe, you're not talking about South you know, Brazil or the United States, then, why are you using the word sovereignty? Why don't you just say, you know, talk about various institutional regimes for governance. And I think men also tried to somewhat muddy the water, particularly when she talks about individual sovereignty. So the notion of individual sovereignty would mean, in fact, an entirely globalized governance regime in which individuals anywhere would have essentially the same rights, right if individuals are the sovereign, and this is sort of conjoint within the economist notion of consumer sovereignty, they are in a position to make choices, and that means you don't want their state telling them they can't make the choices that they want to make. So if you are a Chinese, you know cyberspace, Administration of China, you are very much in the business of reducing and restricting those choices. And if you are the European saying, we're going to force you to use a European cloud, or we want to tax you to build a European cloud. And again, I think you're very much in the business of restricting individual choices. So I would be all for individual sovereignty. But again, it comes down to what is the governance regime? What is the institutional basis of the global governance of the digital is it new globalized institutions built around the internet, community and the users and the individuals and the producers of the services? Or is it a state centric system of institutional regimes built around whatever the United Nations trade treaties, state centric regulations. That's kind of the choice that we're facing. So that's how I would couch the debate. I'll stop there. I think we want to get to our last contributor who has some very interesting things to say, and we'll, of course, have many more points of debate as we go forward.

Thank you, Milton, last but not least, Maria Leah and I saw Julia and min taking notes already, so we'll bounce it back to you for responses to some of the other statements and then get into an open discussion. But Maria Leah, the floor is yours.

Thank you. Johann is fascinating discussion, as expected. Many thanks to the organizers for bringing us here. I think that I will start with the last part of your question. What do we mean by Internet openness? And as we have seen, we can understand it in different ways. But I think a good place to start is to look back into the discussions on internet openness at the Internet Governance Forum, and they usually relate to flows, and they have boiled down to a few things, the interoperability of protocols, end to end, movement of data, which has enabled services, applications and the digital economy as a whole, and the flow of content and ideas for the internet. So whatever we measure the impact on openness, I think we should go back to these basic things. Throughout the last decades, we have approached digital sovereignty in very different ways, and that also led to a different relation with regards to the impact on openness of the internet. So at first, we had a very liberal phase in which digital sovereignty was a taboo. Expression is perhaps only by China, Russia and a few others, and it was a synonym of authoritarianism, protectionism, and the focus was on openness, and openness was about mostly rupturing the technical governance of the Internet to ensure interoperability and liberalizing the digital economy for the cross border flow of products and services. That's the moment in which the WTO and all our trade treaties were being created, and we moved on to a second phase in which we are still in a context of digital liberalism, but liberalism that was mitigated by a social project. So this phase was marked by an attempt to recalibrate two big imbalances that this liberal digital order had created. One of them is related to economic inequalities in terms of access to digital resources, infrastructure, data, so on into the sharing of dividends from the digital economy, and the second is a rights based inequality, which is visible through governmental surveillance and surveillance capitalism that has been mentioned here. So the attempts to remedy this inequalities had led to a demand for strengthening the state visa V digital markets, which is pretty much what Julia was talking about, so the state could promote the redistribution of gains and to protect our rights. And we realized that empowering the state would be very difficult in this situation, because we had created a whole network of trade agreements, which had pretty much narrowed down the policy space that governments had to operate. So I think that the idea of sovereignty, in this sense, conflates with the notion of enhancing the autonomy of governments to act without going against this liberal order and without completely smashing down and ruining the open internet that we had created. So in this moment, I think that the cracks in the liberal order started to become visible in this tension that tries to preserve the open internet but also seeks to reclaim the autonomy to define one's own policy goals and the limits that we want to establish as societies. I think that we are moving into a very interesting and challenging phase right now, which is a new mercantilist phase. So in this phase, the political project of liberalism is not just being tweaked and adjusted anymore. It's been totally overridden by a new mercantilist project, political agenda which gives precedent to the state vis a vis the markets, but not as an attempt to protect rights or to redistribute the economy. Must assist the state in fulfilling its geopolitical goals. So in this case, the precedence that is given to the States is a necessity to hedge against external threats brought not only by interdependence itself, but by the expectation that we have, that any interdependence will be misused and weaponized against us. So this logic may manifest itself in the form of state capitalism or populist economic nationalism, as we see in the US today, and the goal is to promote national security. So I think that we are in a moment in which the idea of digital sovereignty really risks being captured by securitizing narratives. And my this new mercantilist project that we have today. It was interesting to see how the economist provided a whole list of choke points that Europe could use against the US in this moment, and the idea of halting access to machines to produce semiconductors and taxing internet companies was high at the top of the of the list. And we have seen actions that touch upon these three ideas of openness, of the internet, blocking IPs in the context of the war in Ukraine, or the idea of blocking platforms as a way, such as Tiktok, for example, and nanopan is here with us. It's an expert on that to try to prevent some sort of speech to circulate in other countries. So I think that little by little, we are narrowing down this notion of openness, and I think it will be inevitable that we have an impact on all three layers. Perhaps the layer of services is the one that is more impacted today, but I don't think that any other layer will be completely influenced by this movement, especially if this notion of new mercantilism takes

root. Thank you, marilly. I mean, thank you all for raising really pertinent and controversial points. So I to open the floor for for comments or responses to the other speakers. Bill, I mean, I saw you take notes or Anupam.

You go ahead, please. Yeah, thanks. Oh, now Milton scan. I was actually going to respond to him, but he has said, Oh, yes, don't walk away from me. No, I actually wanted to respond to Milton. I also wanted to follow up on what Maria said, because I very much share the last concern she has, and something that we've been seeing over the last couple of months in Europe, of course, as well as a reaction to whatever's going on in the US is this turn to Neo mercantilist ideas and practices. But responding to Milton, I think, first of all, it's important to not conflate as what we me and Milton report as what we see as research, doing research on the discourse of different stakeholders regarding digital sovereignty. What I reported is what I can see about what Europe is meaning in terms of digital sovereignty. I don't share that notion. I don't share even I think the belief it's the right wording that they use. No, it's definitely not. And I keep asking European policy makers, when they speak about digital sovereignty, why they needed to pick that very concept of sovereignty if they couldn't pick another one. Because, I mean, that was already taken by Russia and China, right? So it's not something that that was kind of that blended itself for this new vision of a digital transformation that is human rights based and value based. So I am, but I it has happened and has historical reason, and it has discursive reasons why it was chosen and why it became this notion. So just don't conflate what we report is what we observe in the discourse with our own opinion. So I don't share that point taken. Point taken yet. Yes, so that was the first one, and the second one, I think what we also a point that we need to make, is the digital sovereignty, as I observe it in the European discussions, is not about the internet. It's much more about the digital transformation. So it's not necessarily about the internet infrastructure. I fully share your kind of concerns regarding the internet infrastructure. I fully aware of the history and what the governance system around the internet, but what I see is digital sovereignty becomes such a strong and kind of attractive concept is because it actually kind of moves away from the idea that we need this kind of global infrastructure to we need a vision for a digital transformation that is different than vision we had for the Internet, which is a very globalized vision, which I mean we have, we have to kind of Accept this has been heavily influenced by us thinking, by ideas of internet exceptionalism, by ideas of cyber libertarianism. And many of these points are, of course, still visible in the discourse, but many of these kind of ideas also gave Ray like gave kind of reason to what we see now in the digital economy and what we see now happening in the US. So this kind of mix between political power and cyber libertarian ideas can be very dangerous. And I think that's something that that that kind of people are reacting to. So they need an alternative vision for for digitalization, going beyond kind of the visions we had for the global Internet. And I see this is coming out, like digital sovereignty is one of the kind of efforts coming out of this kind of search for new imaginary of a digital society. It's an imaginary about not being so much dependent on like on companies being based outside of the regions we live in, being dependent on the values these companies might diffuse worldwide, and also not being so much dependent on whatever vision is kind of in written into these infrastructures that we have. So that's my opinion on that topic. Amen.

Thank you, Julia, for your comments, and really into some of the problems we've been, you know, talking about, most would agree and free and open Internet is desirable, but the question is, how did we fail to deliver on that promise? And many blame states and you know, as the main corporates for building walls around themselves and trying to tear the internet apart. But I think there's a little bit more to that the ideals of a free and open internet and liberalism, more broadly, are built on a foundation of contradictions. One hand, it champions equal rights and liberty for all, fostering remarkable material inequality. Its legitimacy rests on the notion of consent, but discourages civic commitments to each other in favor of privatization and in pursuit of, you know, individual autonomy, it has given rise to, somehow, the largest corporate and state surveillance systems in human history. So I think you know what we're seeing, whether it's through the discourse of various forms of digital sovereignty and why not. We shouldn't be surprised that there are growing concerns from around the world that the internet user rights and liberties might have been endangered rather than enabled, and many states feel somehow that they are increasing in power to intervene on behalf of their citizens and medicines. So true. I mean, some states do use this to gain more power and control, but to call any government intervention as regressive, or, you know, is when non intervention at all is not a real solution either. So that's a dilemma that we face now, today, I think we're on the same page by asking how to restore a rights based internet, global internet system and rules. And, you know, governance against strong states, against big tech that people now are reacting to in the probably in the in not the right way. So, and I think this discourse about digital sovereignty is very much, I agree with Julia, reaction to this

reality that we face

a two finger here about the internet versus the digital. You know, this is some advance that has taken place at my own thinking. We now speak not of internet governance, but of a digital ecosystem which was tied together by the internet, but all of the issues that we're speaking about within the framework of the Internet Governance Forum, or internet governance generally, are really digital issues, and they involve data governance, they involve software as A control system. They involve networks, and they involve semiconductors or information processing hardware. So these are an integrated digital ecosystem. And I think Maria has it right when she talks about Neo mercantilism being the replacement for the liberal vision. And I have to say, in response to men, I totally disagree with this sort of apocalyptic vision, which, by the way, is shared by Trump, that you know, the liberal internet created this disastrous result. I think that there were lots of issues related to the appropriation of data and the appropriation of new resources that are created in technological evolution is always somewhat messy, but I think that the you know, the the so called digital divide that men is talking about, I have never Seen it close so rapidly as it has been with the liberalization of telecommunications and the introduction of competition and market forces into telecommunications. Let me remind you that Europe, with its state monopoly telephone systems, had the same level of penetration as the United States in the 1970s that the US had in the 1920s because the US had competition, intense competition, to in the telephone industry in Europe, had state monopolies, you know, controlled by their telegraph companies and postal monopolies. And the same thing happened once we started liberalizing telecommunications in the 80s and 90s, we had massive expansions of access. Now, obviously there are poorer regions of the world that are still not connected, but the you know, it's quite amazing how many proportion of the world's people actually have smartphones or mobile phones, compared to, you know, the 10 to 1% that they had under state monopoly systems. And as for the, you know, the alleged surveillance capitalism, I view this as being, you know, relatively. Benign compared to the way it's often presented, right? I see, you know, essentially something like broadcast television, where you you get free, you get something for free, and your attention gets sold to an advertiser. And that can be, can be intrusive, and governments have done a good job, in some cases, particularly in Europe, about sorting out what are the rights of users to protect the data or to have choice over how their data is used. But I think that, again, is something that we are making progress on problems as we as we come along, there are also many technical efforts to to protect privacy, and there are ways in which the companies themselves are now competing to say we offer better privacy than our than our competitors. So I think the biggest problem with surveillance are indeed coming from the state. I think it's, it's almost incredible that people would not see that. I mean, the the the inventor of the surveillance capitalism term as Shoshana zuboff, no, she doesn't even talk about Snowden, just says, oh, there's these private, big tech platforms. And only thing she had to say about the Snowden revelations was that the that that the NSA got data from the platforms right? There's just a complete disconnection from the issues related to state power there.

So Milton, thank you. That's been a long two finger interruption. Yeah. So, yeah, Johann, is you have to do a better job of disciplining people. Sorry, but hey. So I just want to add a couple of quick cautions and picking up on Milton's point this very platform right now, we're talking to each other. I'm in London. I don't know where Milton is, maybe in Georgia. Men, you know, we're spread all over the world, and we're communicating with people all over the world. This is magic. These technologies have given us things that we just take for granted at this point, and so I think we ought to be this is an American company zoom, which, you know, in some you know, European quarters might be kicked out because it's not European enough and not safe. Might transfer data to the United States. And so, you know, there the question of sharing of dividends from the digital economy. Boy, I live with those dividends every day, and I think we all do in so many different ways that are passed unnoticed. So I think that we have received lots of dividends. Has there been, you know, incredible disparities of wealth, etc, that's all true. So but, but let's not, let's not forget that there are incredible dividends that we've received. The second thing, Julia, the work, you're right to worry about the Brussels effect and kind of pushing, you know, Brussels law elsewhere. But the problem the underlying assumption is that Europe has a consistent set of values, that Europe has a shared common vision, that there are 27 member states which have disparate surveillance laws, which you know, repeatedly come into violation under the European Court of Human Rights, whether or not the European Court of Human Rights judgments are actually followed in any of the 27 member states, et cetera, et cetera. Remember Europe, the court of the European Court of Justice, European Court of Human Rights, was in charge of Russia till just like three years ago. So that was a party to this convention, etc. So apparently, you know, all human rights was universalized through Russia as well. That's clearly not the case, right? So I think we ought to be very cautious of assuming that Europe can manage these powers within Europe and others, well, we can't trust them to manage it, because they're just, they're really backwards. We've got civilization. They don't. We can manage these laws. Others can't. I think Europe should also look at itself. You know, we've just seen the United States, you know, which many people have said has a shared value system with Europe, etc. We've seen the United States, you know, come out swinging against many, what many of us would consider, you know, human rights values and so, and that can happen. And I would venture every one of the 27 member states of the European Union, and it's, it's, you know, and so an example, two years ago, there were riots, you know, you might consider them comparable to the Rodney King, right? You know, sorry to the George Floyd riots, the Rodney King riots in the United States, etc. You know, decades of these things that occurred outside Paris in non terror, France, and immediate response of the of the French government the black child here killed by the police. So even more kind of viscerally shocking, and so the response of the French government was to say, this is the fault of Snapchat and Tiktok and so, you know, so this, it's very easy to point and say, Oh, maybe we should have the power to shut these platforms down, etc. So I would just be very cautious about the use of all these measures. Within the European Union, there is a lot of this is dressed up in the language of fundamental rights. And there are many, many people for whom that sincere, but it just happens to coincide with a very protectionist, a protectionist impulse, a NEO mercantilism that has already been prevalent in Europe on digital matters, which is we're seeing very much in goods matters in the United States over the last week. And so I think all of that is really, truly problematic. It's bad for Europe, bad for bad for the world, and bad for human rights.

Well, thanks. Okay, so we have quite a number of comments, and I think it rather than focusing on specific ones, but I would probably try to do is try to sort of synthesize what some of the comments said, and maybe ask, turn it into sort of our last question for the panelists. And I think there's sort of a notion among some of the comments that there are some legitimate goals, right, that here are in play, that sort of goals of perhaps control of a data national policies that might differ in regard to privacy, for example, maybe security concerns even could be legitimate. But are there any we've seen a lot of the tensions now in the discussions. But do you see any ways how such more regionally, nationally diversified goals could actually be reconciled with this notion of a global open commons that has done so many good good things for human flourishing anyway. To reconcile those two, are we in on a collision course here, where we are moving toward a new geopolitical ordering, not only of our economic and political spaces, but also of the of the internet space. Yeah, I don't

think that we need necessarily to reconcile them. I think that this vision that we had in the beginning of an open Internet needs to be adjusted across time. Perhaps it will not be as open as before, and perhaps that's okay. So for example, maybe we will not put in place a blanket data localization that will prevent payments for from being done across borders. But perhaps some countries will want to localize health data, for example, for public policy reasons. That breaks with the idea that all data should flow across borders, and that's okay. Perhaps it's wrong to say that platforms such as Tiktok should not operate in a country, and I think that product access was a good solution to appease concerns, but that was not accepted by the US government. I think that we are taking things out of proportion, and for a long time, we have ignored concerns that are real concerns, concerns with digital inequality. It's not because liberalism has given many benefits to us, such as cutting red tape and lowering the price of things or stopping discrimination of products and services being sold by different countries that we should accept everything over and over several international organizations, they have published reports showing how economic concentration in the digital economy is not narrowing, it's growing. And this has become a risk even to the stability of our democracies, and it's a risk that we need to tackle so we cannot just overlook these problems. Another problem to me, that is framed as digital sovereignty, which is not this is an issue of Classic sovereignty is information operations conducted by countries to destabilize democracies in other countries. This is this should not depend on finding a solution of a sovereign digital infrastructure to be tackled. This is something that we should rebuff and forbid and treat as a problem related to classic sovereignty. So there are tensions, there are issues that are real, and perhaps we need to recalibrate what we understand by the open internet today in a way that allows these fundamental functions of interoperability data flows and the flow of ideas to function, but that also preserve that capacity of actors, political actors, not companies, in my view, to determinate what is the risks, what is the limits that they want to impose And what they want to accept in their digital societies.

I guess. What is the what is the institution that is going to make these choices? Is it just going to be the nation state, or is are there new global governance institutions that can also be established to help us make these choices? So, for example, you talk about you like Project Texas, inexplicably, that's that's a terrible data localization agreement, and by the way, it put the US government in charge of that. So, so once you open the door to these nationalistic forms of control, particularly in this age of rising Neo mercantilism, it seems like you're, you are fundamentally at odds with with the open Internet. It's very hard to find the kinds of reasonable middle grounds that you were describing Marilia, which which are good. And I think actually, we are arriving at some of those changes and compromises. But there's also a very strong 10 trend, driven in many ways by this notion of digital sovereignty, to to create these mercantilist islands.

To clarify, I don't like it at all, I just cannot understand why they didn't take it, because it goes hand in hand with their control project.

I'm looking at the timeline here, and I would like to give, first of all, Anupam the final word, perhaps, but maybe before min Julia, did you want to weigh in on the last question?

Well, I would actually like to respond to Anupam, because I think what he points to is exactly what I meant when I said I find this highly problematic that Europe is trying to externalize its digital sovereignty approach and bring it to outside of Europe. Because, first of all, Europe is not doing great in terms of digital transformation. I mean, that's something that probably Europe has to acknowledge, and it is when it finds these regulations. They're a compromise between 27 member states with very different traditions, and they are always a compromise. And that might be a compromise that works at that very moment for Europe, but it might not work for other countries. And I think it's a complete arrogance in Euro centuries and to think that we can just export this regulation. So I don't even think that the Brussels effects exist to the point that Anna Bradford thinks it exists, or assumes it exists, because there's also very little empirical research actually showing that this exists to this point. I actually think that the European regulation outside of Europe has negative consequences and not taking into account within Europe because it makes companies focus on Europe and neglect, maybe, for example, content moderation in other parts of the world. So that's, that's just my response to Jon. But I also want to follow up on Maria said, and I think what we really, what this is really about, is that we need to question the fundamental beliefs that have we have built our digital governance system on which are the ideas, often free and open Internet. And I believe that they are. The internet is not as free, as open as we these kind of beliefs try to sell us. So I think the idea of a free internet and the idea of the internet as a global commons. I mean, the reality has shown that this is simply not the case. And I don't have to repeat this, because Amarillo and mean, has explained it in very good like terms, and how, especially us led, digital capitalism has kind of interfered with this. But also, of course, we shouldn't forget, always has been done by authoritarian states, also to kind of build borders, to disrupt information flows, to disrupt data flows, to also disrupt content access to the internet. So we simply have to acknowledge the fact that the internet that we are trying to defend and open and free internet doesn't exist anymore. Maybe has never existed to the point we wanted to believe. So we need kind of a new idea of how to deal with this reality, also how to deal with the reality that there are actually borders in some way in this digital space that have been erected, either by companies or by states, but they exist. So we need to kind of, we can't pretend they're not there. So we need to find a way to kind of handle them and handle these different jurisdiction and how this different legislation that we have and this different kind of territories and these different fields of influence and countries on different stakeholders have come up with this notion of digital sovereignty, I personally believe it's not the right one, but what we need is some kind of vision how to deal with this new reality, and I think If we just try to defend the very much notion of a free and open internet and the governance structures we developed for this free and open Internet, we won't get there.

Min, did you have any additional comments

quickly, since we're running out of time, control by states? You know, some of us heard that are bad, somehow controlled by Corporation is final. I think a truly progressive vision for free and open Internet cannot cannot be there without addressing the negative consequences of both states and excessive concentration for wealth and power in the hands of handful of large corporations, us or Chinese. Return to the commons and return to, you know, the basic social movements grounded in demands for, you know, basic human rights and digital rights from every country, from everywhere, should be the vision moving forward to build a different imaginary and build different infrastructures for governance. And what we have, you know, is not perfect. It is not good at all, and we are running into a dead end, and I think we need a new vision.

Some closing remarks,

sure. So I think there are two big visions of digital sovereignty that we've seen in this hour. One is replacing a foreign tech stack with a domestic tech stock. Okay, so push out the foreign companies, replace it with trusted domestic companies. The one worry there is that the domestic companies are likely to be much more obedient in some way. They have much less ability to push back against excessive infringement of civil liberties. They may have less interest in doing so. They may have lots of connections to the powers that be. And so it is useful for a variety of reasons, from human rights perspective to foreign companies. I think that's true in the United States. I think it's good, good to have a company like Tiktok around and so, so I think all of that. So that's one vision. The second vision is, is one that says, hey, you're operating in our territory. You got to live by our rules. And so these are our rules. We say, you know, there's some privacy protections that you have to have. You can't, you know, abuse your monopoly privileges, you know your monopoly position. Here are these consumer protections that we have in place, etc. That's the view of the Data Protection Directive in 1995 that's the view of the GDPR in 2016 I think those are that's a better view. That's the view, in some sense, of the AI act that says, hey, you know, if you're, if you're providing an AI service, you know, in the European market, then you've got a follower rules. So I think I support that vision, and that's the kind of necessary vision, a kind of outgrowth of sovereignty itself. And as Julia put it at the start, as she said, called a self determination. That's part of self determination. And when we talk about self determination, we talk when we talk about popular sovereignty, we're talking about people. We're talking to the nation state. And those rules are largely made at the nation state level, not by a group of engineers sitting, you know, across the world, etc. Though, of course, any smart government would realize that those engineers are doing a pretty darn good job of keeping the internet running. And, you know, there are lots of ways that this can go bad in very fast with lots of meddling by governments. And governments want to meddle in this desperately because, you know, you know, you saw France shut down the Tiktok in a in a foreign colony. France still has colonies. I mean literally. And so, yeah, so, you know, and so, you know, could it just shut down the whole internet, etc, etc, so, because of local protests, etc, that that emerged. But I also want to say that we want to be really cautious about the just kind of idea that it's going to be local corporations versus local state versus foreign corporations versus local states generally. And so, as as min said, both can be a source of abuse. We have to have democratic processes to challenge all these things. But I think we want to be very cautious to say that there's only one thing that we worry about, which is foreign corporations, lots of governments can can do bad things as well as min, as min points up,

did I intervene quickly? I just want to say that you mentioned the book by Min, and by Julia, I actually have a new book. Oh, it's not showing up here,

showing go, move back a little bit, maybe. Okay, well, it's, it's

called declaring independence in cyberspace. It's internet self governance in the end of us control of ICANN. So my point here is that it's straight up putting forward the idea that we created a new governance institution that was outside the system of sovereignty. Of course, it was tied to the US government. So I discover, I explore the political conflicts that led to the liberation of ICANN from the US government, and how controversial that was in the US but how it did happen. And we do have this institutional model. Obviously it can't be applied to everything, but it is there, and it's something that needs to be taken into account, because it's still somewhat controversial that we have a non sovereign governance model for some key functions of the internet.

Well, I think we have to, we have to close at this point. We'll find a way to try to respond to some of the comments. If Kareem, if you could preserve those, maybe we can. We can have some asynchronous way of responding to some of the ideas that were brought up. Thank you all for an engaging discussion. Is definitely, is not the end of this discussion, right? I mean, I think think that it was constructive, and I think it was not just sort of facing the problems and or the conflicts that might exist between an additional, original, foundational view of the internet and the current political, economic and other realities that have changed as the internet gets more embedded in our lives. So so think there was some constructive ideas for going forward. And I thank you all for your creative input and and thanks again. Thanks everybody, this will have to be continued.

Thank you for organizing. This always fun to do it. Thank You guys, thanks. Yeah, Thanks. Thanks Everybody. You