*The much-awaited policy brief from the UN Secretary-General (UN SG), ‘A Global Digital Compact – An Open, Free and Secure Digital Future for All’ (hereinafter, the Brief), was published last week. Its wide-ranging analysis for a better tomorrow tries to straddle a sobering diagnosis of the digital context and the urgent imperatives for global digital governance. A grim appeal to face the fact that “it is harder to bring a soft toy than an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot to the market today” (p. 3), a strong call to adopt the moral compass of human values (p. 5), and an unequivocal vision for global, multistakeholder action towards a sustainable digital future (p. 5) provide the backdrop to the document’s detailed prescriptions. The detail also reveals the many devils that besiege global dialogue on development in times of the intelligent corporation.

The Brief’s build-up rightly points to the data and innovation divides that have exacerbated global inequality. It observes in no uncertain terms that behind these divides is a massive governance gap. The emphasis to urgently reshape the trajectories of digital innovation to “reflect universal human values and protect the planet” (p. 5), capacitate governments to deliver digital public goods that create the “demand pull” for a “human-centered digital transformation” (p. 6), and align AI regulation with “universal human rights and values” (p. 10) going beyond just self-regulation hits the right notes. However, where the Brief falls short is in clearly articulating how power and politics will be guided into implementation structures and modalities for a ‘new’ paradigm of democratic global digital governance.

Caught in the contradictions of a multilateralism held to ransom by powerful nation-states and their corporations, the UN system seems more inclined to follow the standard counsel for the ‘how-do-you-eat-an-elephant?’ problem. It takes a bit-by-bit approach, where the myth of corporate omnipotence in the prevailing multilateral order and the inequity of digital coloniality become the bridge to cross for later.

The Brief’s build-up rightly points to the data and innovation divides that have exacerbated global inequality. It observes in no uncertain terms that behind these divides is a massive governance gap.

Post-World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) multistakeholderism has achieved little for global digital constitutionalism. It has deepened corporate capture of policy decisions at the multilateral level with Big Tech playing kingpin in defining the narrative. It has fragmented and fractured the cartography of digital governance – with a multiplicity of international approaches across sectors and arenas (including trade, food, ecological systems, labor, and more) that emboldens the rich and powerful to consolidate their position through forum shopping. This dubious legacy must pave the way for a truly radical shift through which the UN system lays the foundations for capable and confident national and sub-national digital societies and economies of tomorrow.

We now proceed to take stock of the specific proposals in the Brief, to closely examine what its subtext portends for the future of global digital governance.

From the ‘What’ to the ‘How’: Missteps in the Brief’s Prescription

The vision and objectives in the Brief reflect a laudable attempt to spell out the elements of the WSIS ideal of a people-centered information society. They capture what is wrong and what must be mended for societies caught in the throes of a data revolution. However, lofty visions need methodological brass tacks that are congruent with the desired ends. The ‘how’ of the transformation must be commensurate with the diagnosis. And this is where the Brief, despite its human rights frame and valid aspiration to make data resources available for people, falls short.

Despite its multifaceted and ambitious vision of digital transformation, the Brief’s proposed methodologies and actions fail to tackle digital realpolitik head-on, failing to put ideas of justice and equity front and center. We point to the omissions and contradictions in the Brief that a Global Digital Compact can ill afford:

a. Need to rein in transnational digital corporations

The unbridled power of transnational digital corporations presents the greatest threat to an open, secure, and free digital future for all. The Brief makes a vague plea for an accountable platform governance model for civic spaces on the internet, but key questions remain unanswered: how are platform companies to be held accountable, and how will their liabilities be enforced? The Brief does note how private self-regulation is just not enough (p. 10), but paradoxically ends up falling back on voluntary reform of platform self-governance along the lines suggested by UNESCO’s (proposed) non-binding model for platform regulation (p. 16). To establish accountability for harmful and malicious acts online, the Brief recommends the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, ignoring their lack of teeth to effect the necessary transformation in corporate behavior, especially on the internet.

Despite its multifaceted and ambitious vision of digital transformation, the Brief’s proposed methodologies and actions fail to tackle digital realpolitik head-on, failing to put ideas of justice and equity front and center.

Similarly, any “meaningful effort” to bring together stakeholders to consider the implications of AI and ensure alignment with universal human rights and values before application surely needs more than an “advisory” mechanism (p. 10). The problem today is not just that countries don’t know how to regulate AI within their national jurisdictions. AI models of big corporations operate in a transnational arena with impunity. Without international rules for AI development and application, “practical guidance” or “showcase of good practices” (p. 15) will only further the status quo.

b. Accounting for inequality and exclusions arising from multistakeholder partnerships

The Brief adopts a somewhat naive view of pooled financing (p. 14) and multistakeholder partnerships for honing digital infrastructural capabilities to meet the SDGs (p. 6). There is mounting evidence on how public-private partnerships as a means of implementation have failed to deliver the desired result, instead entrenching corporate capture of the multilateral policymaking space and creating dependencies for governments in the Global South.

The Brief’s call for urgent investments in the (global) “data commons” for pooling data across borders, building datasets and standards for interoperability, and bringing together AI expertise for the SDGs (p. 7) can be a dangerous path, in the absence of strong commons governance. Scholars and activists in domains such as food and health systems have demonstrated how corporate interests can hijack the global data commons built with contributions from developing countries. While the need for data pools and global standards for data is a legitimate aspiration for people’s science in the international arena, especially in a post-Covid world, the cart cannot be put ahead of the horse. The heart of the issue is equity in benefits, which must be on the table along with the barriers erected by proprietary AI solutions built on common pool data. The Global Digital Compact cannot afford such distortions that impact the majority world, and prevent future innovation and local development. Unless the rules for globalizing the data commons are able to address equity, terms like “multistakeholder partnerships” (p. 6) and “global talent” (p. 10) will end up as a smokescreen that perpetuates corporate-controlled digital ecosystems in developing countries.

c. Making the right to development a key priority in digital governance

Despite its tall ambition to provide a framework to “prevent digital inequalities becoming irreversible global chasms” (p. 5), the Brief sidesteps the here-and-now imperatives for development justice. An equitable digital future needs a fundamental restructuring in the allocative, distributive, and redistributive mechanisms governing data and AI as drivers of the economy. But given that the powers that be are in no mood to share the spoils of a burgeoning data economy, the Brief simply tiptoes around this truism, postponing the resource governance question about data to a future ‘Global Data Compact’ (p. 16), thus leaving the status quo of corporate data enclosure untouched.

Similarly, coordinated action across national regulators on digital, competition, taxation, consumer protection, online safety, and data protection policies, as well as labor rights is seen as the recipe for “ensuring alignment of emerging digital technologies with our human values” (p. 17). But such harmonization of national regimes is in fact predicated on a host of international political economy considerations that mark our human-digital predicament: fairness and equity in digital trade, reforms to intellectual property in the data economy, and development financing regimes to build autonomous digital infrastructure, all of which find no mention in the Brief.

The Brief’s call for urgent investments in the (global) “data commons” for pooling data across borders, building datasets and standards for interoperability, and bringing together AI expertise for the SDGs can be a dangerous path, in the absence of strong commons governance.

The UN SG’s policy brief does come with some offerings. It casts connectivity as the primary field of action (p. 13); affirms a human rights bottom-line for next-generation internet, data, and AI technologies (pp. 14, 16 & 17); and makes a valuable case for personal data protection (p. 16). Yet, its development blind spot is its Achilles heel; digital infrastructural autonomy for nations and peoples is contingent on radical structural changes not limited to liberal human rights. Also, the aim of data governance cannot be reduced to a matter of giving individuals the ‘choice’ to control personal data for opting in or out of digital services. What is needed is a supra-liberal, constitutional and development-oriented framework.

By obscuring the realpolitik of data value and its democratization for national and local development, the Brief simply postpones the pressing task of reining in the digital corporate leviathan and building the consensus for a genuinely democratic and equitable digital future.

The right to development is an inalienable human right by virtue of which individuals and collectivities are entitled to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy the fruits of development in all its dimensions. The Brief’s recommendation for a global commoning of data, without attention to the faultlines that skew the national and local realization of data-enabled development is a treacherous path for those already powerless in the current order.

Institutional Arrangements for Digital Governance and Lack of Imagination for Global Democracy

To actualize its vision, the Brief envisages a “networked multilateral arrangement” that can enable harmonized action on just and sustainable digitalization across various wings of the UN system. For the longer term, it recommends the multistakeholder development of a Global Data Compact for adoption by Member States by 2030 (p. 17) and the establishment of a global commission on just and sustainable digitalization proposed by the UN High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism (p. 19). These are matters sought to be achieved post the Global Digital Compact, through a longer term “framework for sustained, practical multi-stakeholder cooperation” (p. 18).

By obscuring the realpolitik of data value and its democratization for national and local development, the Brief simply postpones the pressing task of reining in the digital corporate leviathan and building the consensus for a genuinely democratic and equitable digital future.

Meanwhile, what is recommended is the establishment of a tripartite dialogic space – the Digital Cooperation Forum – for states, private sector, and civil society to engage in periodic review and coordinated follow-up on the Global Digital Compact commitments. Instances of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and its tripartite mechanism, along with civil society participation in conferences of the UNCTAD, the Kimberley process, and membership of private entities in the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) are cited (p. 19) as exemplars that show how tripartite governance mechanisms have been tried and tested to satisfaction.

The expedient translation of civil society and private sector involvement in implementation of the Compact into a sanitized arrangement of formal equality hides many obfuscations. It conflates the technical and political, erases the role of meticulously-evolved norms such as in the worker rights charter of the ILO in establishing legal thresholds, simply omits the place of institutional mandates to define duty bearers and rights holders, and ignores the great unease in these configurations and the extraordinary resources for people’s movements to keep corporations on their toes.

The ILO Tripartite Dialogue clearly specifies the modality of nomination of non-governmental stakeholders; workers’ and employers’ representatives can only be nominated by member states. Without a benchmark or constitution which clarifies rights and duties, and spells out how non-governmental stakeholders are nominated to the digital policy table, how can any democratic multistakeholderism emerge from an idealized tripartism?

The Brief’s recommendation for a global commoning of data, without attention to the faultlines that skew the national and local realization of data-enabled development is a treacherous path for those already powerless in the current order.

The short-term solution to establish a multistakeholder Digital Cooperation Forum for coordinated follow-up just seems to magnify all the flaws of the Internet Governance Forum, and its open dialogic mandate that does not add up to policy decisions. It also creates a legitimacy crisis – with no clarity on how policy priorities will be identified and channeled from a multistakeholderist process that rests rather unsteadily on a digital deal with no fundamental principles or rules essential to a transformed digital paradigm (whether about the governance of data resources or data flows or the regulation of digital transnational corporations, or the reform of international economic law and financing regimes). How are these critical priorities currently outside the schema of the Global Digital Compact but intertwined with all its objectives to be navigated by the Digital Cooperation Forum? Also, the status of the Digital Cooperation Forum vis-a-vis the WSIS consensus is unclear. Is it the enhanced cooperation mechanism that has been long-standing? In that case, how will the legitimate public policy space and duty of states to work for economic and social development of the people be secured? How can the mere involvement of “small and medium-sized enterprises as well as start-ups through representative bodies” ( p. 19) in the Compact implementation processes neutralize the agenda-setting power of big corporations?

The longer-term proposal in the Brief for the resolution of these thorny questions of a new constitutionalism to guide global digital governance – through the establishment of a commission for just and sustainable digitalization – is also unsatisfactory. The commission is imagined as a mechanism that will enable effective multistakeholder cooperation between state, civil society, and private sector actors to work on the following domains: “(a) addressing human rights in the digital age; (b) data governance; (c) inclusive and sustainable digitalization, including universal and meaningful connectivity; and (d) a knowledge function, culminating in the preparation of comprehensive assessment reports on a regular basis” (pp. 41-42 of the Report of the High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism). The idea is to move beyond traditional interstate cooperation to enable a radically new “networked multilateralism” adequate to complex problem-solving.

The ideal of networked multilateralism – “a less hierarchical, more networked (UN) system wherein decision-making is distributed, and where the efforts of a large number of different actors are harnessed towards a collective mission” (p. 6 of the Report of the High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism) – may be in line with a bold, futuristic aspiration for an equal world. But without a clear separation of roles, responsibilities, and powers of state and non-state actors in such distributed decision-making, such a move is only likely to reinforce the corporate takeover of the multilateral policy space.

We are at a crossroads in global digital cooperation; wiser for all the lessons about “equal footing multistakeholderism” that Michael Gurstein acerbically describes as a process in which public interest is seen to somehow emerge magically through the confluence of each stakeholder’s individual stake into a truly democratic global digital governance framework. That global digital governance in the current conjuncture is an unabashed case of Big Tech writing the rules to govern itself is an indisputable fact. Any solution for the long term needs to make a clean departure from this – strong enough to stand on the side of global justice. Anything else will mean the digital transition becomes a force of destruction.

*This brief has been co-developed by Anita Gurumurthy, Nandini Chami, Amay Korjan, Merrin Muhammed Ashraf, and Viraj Desai of IT for Change.