# Submission on GDC inputs

## Process

Chatham House convened an online workshop with experts from industry, academia and civil society, and representative of a range of national and international backgrounds and perspectives. Participants had in common decades experience working with and contributing to Digital Commons for several decades. The meeting was held under the Chatham House rule. We welcome any opportunity to speak with the organisers of the Digital Compact in the weeks following this submission.

## Digital Commons as a global public good

### Principles

**1. Foster Technology with a Democratic Mandate and Non-Hegemonic Sovereignty**

* The digital commons supports much of today's technology infrastructure. Sovereignty over that technology is found not in cutting off, but in steering the ship: by creating and sustaining technology with a social mandate, and by collaborating on that technology's development, design, and governance.
* We understand that current provision of normative technology and digital infrastructure has been left entirely to actors not operating with a social or democratic mandate.

**2. Develop Digital Capabilities Through Human Agency and Collective Action**

* Everyone has the right to fully understand the technology that surrounds them.
* Human agency is key to building and sustaining rights, and individual agency only thrives when supported by collective action.
* We need to give people a voice in the digital world rather than have to beg change from platforms.

**3. Govern Digital Infrastructure as a Commons**

* The model of multistakeholder participation and community governance championed by the IGF and others must be the bedrock of further innovation. However, given the scale and diversity of participants, governance needs to be extended to polycentrism in line with the principles for commons management championed by Elinor Ostrom.
* Relying only on centralised digital governance - whether by corporate monopoly or by state - stifles the Internet's potential.
* We need to develop institutional capacity in digital spaces so that undergoverned spaces resist capture.
* This is fundamentally a multistakeholder approach, but today's stakeholders aren't empowered to meet and cooperate. We need to create a planetary polycentric system of multistakeholder governance.
* Beyond infrastructure, Commons-based governance must be the model for governance of technologies that have normative impact.

**4. Practice Vigilance**

* To avoid the capture of commons, all types of Digital Commons must be protected.
* Making resources open exposes them to authoritarian state and corporate capture, misuse, and existing social power imbalances.
* The IGF and other governance bodies have to date acted as stewards of the open Internet, and that mandate must be maintained, reinforced, and expanded.
* Additional governance measures need to be established to balance the benefit of shared resources with mitigation of potential harms.
* Over the past few decades we have successfully produced open systems, but most have fallen prey to capture and enclosure because they lack the institutional capacity to keep power in check.
* We need interdisciplinary & multistakeholder vigilance as threats continue to emerge whenever open systems are established.

### Commitments

* Governments should foster international, national, local, and community institutions for developing technology with a democratic mandate.
* Governments should base policy on an understanding that technology has normative consequences on society and ensure that that technology is governed as Digital Commons.
* Private Enterprises, Governments and Civil Society should develop a common understanding of the detrimental effects of commons enclosure and capture, and actively work to build resilience in the commons they are involved in.
* Businesses should commit to business model innovation that does not rely on exclusivity.
* Governments should exercise caution in granting monopolies when that may impact Digital Commons.
* Civil Society organisations should take a lead role in practicing vigilance, ensuring that capture and enclosure does not occur.
* Governments should form institutions that research and implement novel polycentric governance methods.
* When procuring technology, governments should insist on Digital Commons, and actively seek international collaboration through the Digital Public Goods Alliance.
* Governments should ensure that all governance bodies are participatory and open to individuals, NGOs and Civil Society organizations.

## Other thematic areas

### Avoid Internet Fragmentation

#### Principles

In our submission for Digital Commons as a global public good, we suggest four overarching principles. We suggest that principles for Digital Commons should inform the UN Digital Compact as a whole. In order to ensure Internet coherence, the two principles of democratic Mandate/Non-hegemonic sovereignty and polycentricity are crucial. With them the apparent tension between requirements of national sovereignity and a global Internet can be reconciled. Digital Commons and Digital Commons-based polycentric governance models must be employed to ensure interoperability on a pluralistic Internet.

#### Commitments

Governments should engage directly in developing Digital Commons. When differences of opinion becomes irreconcilable, a design that is flexible enough to take both opinions into account but while doing so, strives to maintain a highest possible degree of interoperability between the two solutions. Each government would then implement their own version within those constraints.

### Promote regulation of artificial intelligence

#### Principles

* Given that Artificial Intelligence has outsized normative potential, it must be governed under a Digital Commons First principle.
* Deployment of Artificial Intelligence should only happen after the public has been informed of the utility and safety attributes of the technology.
* Human Agency can only be assured once the public has the right to fully understand the technology.
* Artificial Intelligence that has cultivated a strong Digital Commons based development and governance model may be given less strict regulation than technology that does not, but deployment of such technologies should nevertheless be subject to stricter scrutiny.
* The technology should be subject to greater institutional support, both to avoid capture and enclosure, and to develop systems responsibly.
* Foreseeing risk is very difficult, all stakeholders must contribute to risk assessment and mitigation.

#### Commitments

* Governments should establish institutional capacity to contribute to and help form governance of Digital Commons for AI to ensure that the fullest possible understanding of the technology is available to the public.
* Governments should use this understanding to advise and deployment of such technologies.
* Intergovernmental institutions should be formed to ensure that the innovation in the area can progress quickly, but with a democratic mandate from individual governments through Digital Commons.
* Private Enterprises should likewise contribute into the same Digital Commons and develop products that can be assessed.
* Governments should not rely chiefly on regulations that are based on a priori risk classes, but rather focus on possible normative impact, which should be assumed to be significant in most cases.

### Protect Data

#### Principles

- Treat privacy and data protection as a collective problem. Across jurisdictions, privacy has become mired in hyperindividualistic approaches that put people at a disadvantage in front of highly-automated corporations. Data is intrinsically collective, and people must be empowered to act together.
- Support societal vigilance over the uses of data.
- Rectify asymmetries of automation via better user agents with fiduciary duties.
- The privacy impacts of data processing are the same whether the data leaves a person's device or not — what matters is who decides how data is processed.

#### Commitments

- Researchers and journalists can do a lot more to keep data processing in check than people on their own and need to be supported in their work. Regulation must support machine-readable, automated observation of data processing to replace vague, legalistic disclosure.
- Governments should ensure that User agents — browsers, operating systems — have a fiduciary duty towards their users. They are a foundational yet almost entirely unregulated part of the digital ecosystem. They are meant to represent and to protect people, but are too often instrumentalised to be disloyal to users. A fiduciary duty could force their alignment. They can also protect children without disclosing data to other parties.
- Governments should not exempt novel systems that make decisions on people's devices from privacy regulation.