40

 World leaders like President Joe Biden, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have all called for global digital governance based on human rights and democratic principles. Intergovernmental bodies, such as the United Nations, the OECD, UNESCO, and the G20 have digital governance agendas and are working to establish governing frameworks. Add to this dozens of multistakeholder and civil society initiatives, as well as those by tech companies, to bring some semblance of democratic governance to digital spaces. Yet governing digital technology presents novel and complex challenges. Identifying these is an obvious first step toward better understanding the democratic governance solutions likely to help manage them. For one, “digital technology” encompasses a broad and complex array of applications, tools, and use cases, the impacts of which differ from one geographic or socioeconomic context to another. Another related challenge is th