[NA-Discuss] Open Letter from IETF Re: Global Digital Compact

[Glenn McKnight]

https://open-internet-governance.org/letter
An Open Letter to the United Nations

1 July 2024

Secretary-General António Guterres and Envoy on Technology Amandeep Singh
Gill,

Since its inception more than fifty years ago, the Internet’s technical
architecture has evolved and been collaboratively maintained through
multistakeholder processes. While it was born in government laboratories,
the Internet became a network of networks that kept expanding and required
continuous work. Much of that was coordinated in the Internet Engineering
Task Force <https://ietf.org/> (IETF), an open, consensus-based, bottom-up,
voluntary and global standards body.

More than thirty five years ago, the World Wide Web was born in the
laboratories of CERN. It, too, quickly evolved into a global public tool,
maintained and developed by a collaboration of like-minded engineers and
other stakeholders at the World Wide Web Consortium <https://w3.org/> (W3C).
It, too, is an open, bottom-up, consensus-driven, voluntary and global
standards body.

The success of the both IETF’s and W3C’s work can be measured by where the
Internet is today and what it has achieved: global communication has
flourished, bringing education, entertainment, information, connectivity
and commerce to most of the world’s population. The Internet has been a
catalyst for advancing development. These communities and the way they have
structured themselves have paid off.

We recognize that governments take seriously their responsibility to
protect their citizens. So, as harms associated with the Internet and the
Web become more apparent, there is a desire on the part of governments to
act through regulation and legislation. Technical architecture can enable
and influence how the Internet is used, but on its own it cannot address
abuse, misinformation, inequality, or many other issues. There is
nevertheless a potential danger in regulation and legislation, if it
undermines the fundamentally empowering nature of the Internet.

The Internet is an unusual technology because it is fundamentally
distributed. It is built up from all of the participating networks. Each
network participates for its own reasons according to its own needs and
priorities. And this means, necessarily, that there is no center of control
on the Internet. This feature is an essential property of the Internet, and
not an accident. Yet over the past few years we have noticed a willingness
to address issues on the Internet and Web by attempting to insert a
hierarchical model of governance over technical matters. Such proposals
concern us because they represent an erosion of the basic architecture.

In particular, some proposals for the Global Digital Compact
<https://www.un.org/techenvoy/global-digital-compact> (GDC) can be read to
mandate more centralized governance. If the final document contains such
language, we believe it will be detrimental to not only the Internet and
the Web, but also to the world’s economies and societies.

Furthermore, we note that the GDC is being developed in a multilateral
process between states, with very limited application of the open,
inclusive and consensus-driven methods by which the Internet and Web have
been developed to date. Beyond some high-level consultations,
non-government stakeholders (including Internet technical standards bodies
and the broader technical community) have had only weak ways to participate
in the GDC process. We are concerned that the document will be largely a
creation only of governments, disconnected from the Internet and the Web as
people all over the world currently experience them.

Therefore, we ask that member states, the Secretary-General and the Tech
Envoy seek to ensure that proposals for digital governance remain
consistent with the enormously successful multistakeholder Internet
governance practice that has brought us the Internet of today. Government
engagement in digital and Internet governance is needed to deal with many
abuses of this global system but it is our common responsibility to uphold
the bottom-up, collaborative and inclusive model of Internet governance
that has served the world for the past half century.

Signed,

*All signatures are in a personal capacity; affiliations are informational
only.*

   - Daniel Appelquist W3C TAG co-chair
   - David Baron former W3C TAG
   - Hadley Beeman W3C TAG
   - Robin Berjon former W3C TAG; former W3C HTML Activity Lead
   - Andrew Betts former W3C TAG
   - Sir Tim Berners-Lee inventor of the World Wide Web; founder & emeritus
   director, W3C
   - Tim Bray former W3C TAG; Editor of XML (W3C), JSON (IETF)
   - Randy Bush former IESG, former ISO/WG13
   - Dr. Brian E. Carpenter former Group Leader, Communication Systems,
   CERN; former IAB chair; former ISOC BoT chair; former IETF chair
   - Vint Cerf Internet Pioneer
   - David Conrad former IANA general manager; former ICANN CTO
   - Martin Duke former IESG
   - Dr. Lars Eggert former IETF chair; former IRTF chair
   - Dr. Stephen Farrell Trinity College Dublin; former IESG; former IAB
   - Demi Getschko .br
   - Christian Huitema former IAB chair
   - Geoff Huston former ISOC BoT chair; former IAB
   - Erik Kline IESG
   - Mallory Knodel former IAB
   - Konstantinos Komaitis senior resident fellow, Internet Governance
   lead, Democracy and Tech Initiative, Atlantic Council
   - Chris Lilley W3C Technical Director; former W3C TAG
   - Peter Linss W3C TAG co-chair
   - Sangwhan Moon former W3C TAG
   - Jun Murai former IAB; WIDE Project founder; former W3C steering
   committee; former ISOC BoT
   - Mark Nottingham former IAB; former W3C TAG
   - Lukasz Olejnik former W3C TAG
   - Colin Perkins IRTF chair
   - Pete Resnick former IAB; former IESG
   - Alex Russell former W3C TAG
   - Peter Saint-Andre former IESG
   - David Schinazi IAB
   - Melinda Shore IRSG; former IAB
   - Robert Sparks former IAB; former IESG
   - Lynn St.Amour former Internet Society President and CEO; former UN IGF
   Multistakeholder Advisory Group chair
   - Andrew Sullivan former IAB chair
   - Martin Thomson W3C TAG; former IAB
   - Brian Trammell IRSG; former IAB




Glenn McKnight, MA
Virtual School of Internet Governance
Chief Information Officer
www.virtualsig.org
*YOUR SOURCE FOR INTERNET GOVERNANCE EDUCATION *
*Mobile  437-237-4655*
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