Banner: UN Secretary-General António Guterres addresses the opening of the September 2024 Summit of the Future. (Source: Loey Felipe/UN)

On Sunday, September 22, the Pact for the Future and the Global Digital Compact (GDC) negotiations concluded, but not without drama. Despite last minute attempts from Russia to derail the process, the Pact of the Future, including the GDC, was adopted by the UN General Assembly. The GDC is now the new reality for multilateral digital governance.

I have not been a huge fan of the GDC. Not because I consider its agenda insignificant; for example, there was an entire section devoted to human rights, a significant progress when thinking about digital governance; another was on connectivity, a long core priority of global majority countries and something that needs urgent attention. The reason I never liked the GDC is because its timing was off – the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS), which covers similar issues, is meant to be reviewed next year. The UN could have waited. It didn’t.

For what this process signified – the first time in almost 20 years since governments first discussed in the UN during WSIS issues pertaining to digital and internet governance, it felt convoluted and, often, out of reach. It was driven solely by governments and the UN Secretary General’s Tech Envoy office; wider stakeholder consultations were choreographed to look like inclusion, when, in reality, inclusion was an afterthought. For example, during the consultations non-government stakeholders were given 2 minutes to intervene before they were cut off. In one case, the co-facilitators ended a consultation early, despite a number of participants waiting to speak. Adding to this, the fact that the GDC was driven by the UN’s New York headquarters, which are not familiar with multistakeholder processes, made things more obscure. 

If there is one thing the GDC made abundantly clear, however, it is that the stakes for the future of the internet and how stakeholders get to participate in shaping it are high. The GDC allowed some governments to give new life to long defunct ideas about the role of states in the management of internet and digital technologies that are harmful. For the UN, and the Secretary General (SG) personally, the GDC aims to cement a new era of multilateral collaboration. But the centralization of coordination functions under the SG’s office, which will not be accountable to member states or the wider multistakeholder community, throws this into doubt.

The GDC was never meant to be anything more than a positive reinforcement of collaborative digital and internet governance. The original thinking was to come up with a framework that would complement the “multistakeholder action required to overcome digital, data and innovation divides and to achieve the governance required for a sustainable digital future”. That’s how the Office of the Tech Envoy sold it. And, in good faith, that’s how most of us participated. 

The final GDC text has good points, some bad ones and then, some points that were missed opportunities to advance human rights and the multistakeholder model. The future of the GDC now depends on two things: whether its momentum will continue and whether stakeholders will engage in its implementation. There is also the open question on how the GDC will interact with the upcoming WSIS+20 review. WSIS is important because it affirms the multistakeholder, bottom-up coordination of the internet. It is the founding document for the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). It remains to be seen, therefore, whether the GDC Follow Up will happen under the WSIS+20 process or the WSIS+20 process will be subsumed by the GDC Follow Up, under the centralized leadership of the Office of the Tech Envoy. Depending on which way it goes, the future of the multistakeholder model is at stake. If indeed, the GDC follow up happens under WSIS+20, it signals that WSIS is more important and, therefore, both its guiding documents, Geneva Action Lines and the Tunis Agenda remain core to the way we govern and think about digital governance. On the other hand, if the WSIS +20 process becomes secondary to the GDC, then the entire model of internet governance is up for renegotiation.

When it first emerged, in the 1970s, the internet was a small, decentralized set of computers. This meant that no government, company or individual was able to control it. Then came the personal computer, which built on that foundation and created a new wave of digital self-empowerment. People started participating in this network of networks without the requirement of asking permission, and that participation opened unprecedented opportunities for innovation and inclusion. The more people who participated, the more the internet grew and the more resilient it became. Its openness and bottom-up processes allowed for unprecedented access to shaping its future.

Early on it was realized that, for the decentralized internet to reach its full potential, its governance also needed to be decentralized. Collaboration became indispensable—the internet’s existence and growth requiring the participation of governments, engineers, standards’ bodies, the private sector, civil society, and others. Multi-stakeholder governance was inserted as a term post-WSIS and became synonymous with this collaborative way of managing the internet. Despite its limitations and flaws, this loose, collaborative form of governance has made the internet the indispensable tool it is today.

The GDC did not pay attention to any of this history or functionality. Besides making governance all about states, the GDC also manifested the ambitions of the United Nations to have a more central role in internet and digital governance. The Office of the Tech Envoy, under the UN Secretary General (UNSG), made its intentions for centralization in digital governance clear early on. In 2023, the UNSG published a policy brief recommending the creation of a Digital Cooperation Forum; the forum would serve as “a hub and spoke arrangement that would help stakeholders to identify gaps in mulitistakeholder cooperation” and, act as the central place for coordinating the activities of “existing forums and initiatives” that would be responsible for supporting “the translation of Compact objectives into practical action […]”. 

After failing to garner support from both member states and the broader internet community, the idea of the Digital Cooperation Forum was abandoned. The intention for the UN to centralize and institutionalize parts of digital governance was not. The final, agreed-upon text of the GDC reads: “[…], we request the Secretary-General, following consultations with Member States, to submit a proposal to the General Assembly during its seventy-ninth session for the establishment of an Office of the Secretary General’s Tech Envoy on Technology, to facilitate system-wide coordination, working closely with existing mechanisms.” This is centralization at its best.

If overdone, this level of centralization is bound to cause disruption in the communities and norms that have shaped the internet for all these years. What exactly can an office within the UN in New York achieve in terms of coordination remains an open question. However, the way the New York office of the UN operates does not provide any reassurances given how renowned it is for making the participation of stakeholders, especially civil society, extremely difficult. Judging from the levels of participation during the GDC process, there is little doubt that a centralized function under the Office of the Tech Envoy will be neither inclusive nor welcoming to the communities that have been shaping the future of technology over the past three decades. Civil society shares this concern; so do engineers and people involved in standard-setting.

Centralizing governance at the UN in New York will provide a space where only governments are allowed to make the rules. Unlike in Geneva, where UN institutions generally allow for submissions and statements from civil society, in New York the participation of civil society is restricted, stakeholder access to diplomats is harder, speaking slots are not assigned easily, and a civil society organization would need to partner with a member state to organize an event. If the GDC process is of any indication, the UN in New York will neither appreciate nor serve the multistakeholder model. 

Twenty years ago, the opening sentence of the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) Declaration of Principles, read, “We, the representatives of the peoples of the world…”. It was a remarkable moment for technology because people were at the center – not states. 

Twenty years later, people are no longer in the center; states are. In the GDC “we, the representatives of the peoples of the world” has been substituted by “we, [the governments]”. Throughout the GDC process it has become clear that the GDC is fundamentally a process that was negotiated by governments and for governments.

It was inevitable that, at some point, China would take its vision for the internet and present it to the UN. The GDC was China’s opportunity to pitch its domestic and international digital strategy and use the relationships it has created through the Belt and Road Initiative to cement its place as the tenacious advocate for multilateral, state driven digital governance.

The GDC ended up being much more than just another UN process. If WSIS was characterized by optimism and collaboration, the GDC was all about control and tension. In particular, the G-77, a coalition of 134 developing countries focused on articulating their collective economic interests, and China seized the opportunity to advocate for changes in the current governance system by using the process to promote a state-centric and top-down governance structure. The Tech Envoy, on the other hand, ran a process that was less collaborative and less open compared WSIS, inadvertently feeding into China’s narrative. It would have been appropriate for the Tech Envoy to have tried to adhere to the collaborative governance framework of the past 20 years, but instead collaboration was supplanted by control.

China’s participation in the G-77 group is not a new tactic; but it is an effective one. Although China is not officially a member of the G-77 group, there is a consistent alignment in their positions and China often seeks to leverage the group to promote its own agenda. Earlier this year, for example, China rallied the G-77 to push for the reform of the way the World Trade Organization (WTO) is governed, arguing that it disproportionately favors the West. With the GDC, China did the same. China’s association with the G-77 offers it an opportunity to collaborate with over 130 countries in terms of collective bargaining and negotiations with the west on multilateral agreements at the UN level. This provides China with a strong hand that it can now take to the WSIS+20 Review.

Over the past few years, China’s influence within the UN has increased significantly, expanding its engagement specifically with the development pillar. This strategic focus allows China to be a rising and leading voice in the UN, especially in processes like WSIS and the GDC, among the G-77 countries. In fact, whereas in the other thematic areas of the Pact of the Future – space, international financing mechanisms, climate – China and the G-77 were not submitting common positions, in the GDC they were coordinated and mostly speaking in one voice. This demonstrates that the WSIS consensus over the multistakeholder model of internet governance is wearing thin and that China’s influence is growing stronger.

This new, state-centered reality is a central part of China’s foreign policy. At the core of China’s vision of the internet is innovation that is based on central control and sovereignty rights. In this scenario, the long-standing and hard-fought multistakeholder processes that have formed the modern internet are traded for multilateral ones that exist within the UN system and obey UN rules, giving China a chance to make its own model globally competitive. Civil society participation is limited, and discussions are less about user-empowerment and more about the permission of states to control our digital future.

Even though the GDC does not do that, it gave China a platform to showcase its own vision. There may not be many winners from the GDC, but China, and the office of the Tech Envoy, is amongst the few of them. In the GDC, China showed up prepared to socialize and create buy-in among countries for its vision, further dividing resources and attention, and muddying the agendas for digital governance with authoritarian friendly concepts, policies and proposals. China may not have gotten everything it wanted, but it set the foundations for the direction it will be fighting for. The GDC was only a building block.

When the GDC was first introduced two years ago, there was a sense of cautious optimism as it included some much-needed issues related to development. However, as things unfolded, values and principles core to internet governance, including multistakeholder participation, seemed sidelined, and issues long agreed upon at WSIS+20 were reopened, allowing authoritarian ideas to gain traction. Last week the Summit for the Future wrapped up; now it is time to start implementation. Core questions of the internet’s future will be decided. As the WSIS+20 review is about to start, we can look at the lessons learned from the past two years to understand how the next critical steps will unfold.

The GDC gave us a front-row seat on how the next few years, and especially next year’s WSIS+20 review, will play out. What we have is a closely coordinated G-77 group and China, an Office of the Tech Envoy that is determined to centralize coordination functions in New York, and a reality where consensus around the multistakeholder model among member states is wavering. All these things add new pressure points to the already strained multistakeholder model, and they will cause new challenges over the next few years.  

Konstantinos Komaitis, “Analysis: a brave new reality after the UN’s Global Digital Compact,” Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), October 1, 2024, https://dfrlab.org/2024/10/01/analysis-a-brave-new-reality-after-the-uns-global-digital-compact.