World leaders like President Joe Biden, UN Secretary-General

 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 the scale and pace of change. The world wide web has been around for only three-plus decades but it has upended human ideas of what is sacred, what is right, what is wrong, what is just, what is true and more, and more what is real in many parts of the world.

Adding to the difficulty is the many types of stakeholders involved in digital governance. Though born from a U.S. Department of Defense initiative, the internet developed as a loose collaboration between companies, universities, nonprofits, and individuals. The private sector has been critical from the start, and today much of the digital world’s critical infrastructure and data is owned, operated, and kept safe by companies. This means that businesses especially, but also NGOs and other actors, end up, either intentionally or by default, playing a large role in digital governance.

Extreme concentrations of power in the digital domain exacerbate the challenges above. Around the world, governments or state-owned enterprises control much of the physical infrastructure of the internet, a situation that enables those with jurisdictional or territorial control to weaponize it or shut it off. Companies and even individuals also wield immense power. Decisions made by the entrepreneur Elon Musk regarding how and whether to provide Starlink satellite internet service to the Ukrainian military in its defense against the Russian invasion have had a significant impact, at first in supporting Ukraine and later in hampering it. Owing to the logic of network effects, the platforms and content on the internet are largely controlled by a handful of firms. In 2020, the top five tech titans accounted for 20 percent of the U.S. stock market’s total worth, and almost 3 billion people used Meta-owned social media applications.