Day 0 Event #174 Giganet Annual Academic Symposium – Morning session

Summary

This transcript captures the Giganet Academic Symposium at the IGF 2025 in Oslo, featuring multiple research presentations on internet governance and technology policy. The symposium was organized by Sophie Hoogenboom and included several panels examining different aspects of global technology governance.

The first panel, moderated by Jamal Shahin, focused on “From the Tunis Agenda to WSIS plus 20, Pioneering Sustainable Development with LEO Satellites as Critical Internet Infrastructures.” Jonathan Liebenau from LSE presented the economic and historical perspectives of low-Earth orbit satellites, examining business models and explaining why previous LEO projects failed while current ones like Starlink show promise. He emphasized that success depends on government engagement, military applications, and spillover effects rather than just subscriber numbers. Joanna Kulesza from the University of Łódź discussed international law challenges regarding LEO satellites, highlighting jurisdictional complexities and sovereignty issues as traditional space law frameworks struggle to address modern satellite constellations and data governance challenges.

The second panel presented research from the EU-funded REMIT project on multilateralism and technology governance. Roberta Haar introduced the project’s methodology using advocacy coalition frameworks to map policy coalitions. Her research on US foreign policy revealed three coalitions within the Biden administration: New Isolationists, Multilateralists, and Flexilateralists, with the latter dominating policy and adopting surprisingly Trump-like approaches to China. Dennis Redeker and Marielle presented analysis of 321 digital bills of rights spanning 30 years, identifying four discourse coalitions around human rights, inclusionary rights, security, and content governance. Apolline Rolland examined how the concept of “emerging technologies” shapes cybersecurity governance, arguing that current assessment tools inadequately capture cybersecurity’s unique characteristics.

The final panel featured two frontier papers. Chelsea Horne analyzed parental controls across social media platforms, finding significant inconsistencies and questioning whether these controls represent genuine solutions or corporate posturing. Vagisha Srivastava examined India’s Central Bank Digital Currency initiative, arguing that strategic and sovereignty concerns outweigh stated inclusion goals. The symposium concluded with discussions about translating academic research into practical policy recommendations and the ongoing challenges of multi-stakeholder governance in an increasingly fragmented digital landscape.

Keypoints

## Major Discussion Points

– **LEO Satellites and Internet Infrastructure Governance**: The opening panel examined low-Earth orbit satellites as critical internet infrastructure, exploring economic models, business cases, jurisdictional challenges, and the need for new governance frameworks as private actors gain significant control over space-based connectivity.

– **Multilateralism and Technology Governance**: Researchers from the REMIT project presented findings on how domestic coalitions shape global technology norms, analyzing digital bills of rights, cybersecurity futures, and the shift in U.S. foreign policy from liberal internationalism toward more protectionist approaches in strategic technology competition with China.

– **Child Online Safety and Platform Design**: Discussion of parental controls as a regulatory mechanism, examining how platforms implement safety measures for minors, the political framing of online safety legislation, and the tension between individual responsibility and platform accountability in protecting children online.

– **Digital Currencies and Financial Sovereignty**: Analysis of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) as tools for monetary and digital sovereignty, using India’s pilot program as a case study to explore tensions between financial inclusion goals and strategic geopolitical objectives.

– **Multi-stakeholder Governance Challenges**: Critical examination of the limitations of multi-stakeholder approaches in internet governance, including representation gaps, implementation challenges, and the need to move from principles to actionable policies with enforcement mechanisms.

## Overall Purpose

The discussion served as the annual GIGANET Academic Symposium at IGF 2025, bringing together researchers to present cutting-edge academic work on internet governance challenges. The symposium aimed to bridge academic research with policy practice, examining how emerging technologies reshape governance frameworks and exploring the evolution of multilateral cooperation in digital spaces.

## Overall Tone

The discussion maintained a scholarly yet pragmatic tone throughout. It began with technical and economic analysis of satellite infrastructure, evolved into more critical assessments of existing governance models, and concluded with forward-looking discussions about policy implementation. While academic in nature, there was consistent emphasis on real-world policy implications and the urgent need for actionable solutions to contemporary internet governance challenges. The tone remained constructive and collaborative, with participants building on each other’s research while acknowledging the complexity and limitations of current approaches.

Speakers

**Speakers from the provided list:**

– **Sophie Hoogenboom** – Current chair of the program committee of Giganet

– **Jamal Shahin** – Current chair of Giganet

– **Joanna Kulesza** – University of Łódź, speaking on international law and LEO satellites, jurisdiction, sovereignty, and human rights

– **Jonathan Liebenau** – London School of Economics, professor of technology management and historian of technology, speaking on evolution of low-Earth orbit satellites from historical and economic perspectives

– **Trisha Meyer** – University of Brussels, panel chair

– **Roberta Haar** – Dr., PI of EU consortium called Remit, researcher in geopolitics, professor at Maastricht University, American foreign policy specialist

– **Dennis Redeker** – Lead in Work Package 3 of Remit project, data management specialist

– **Apolline Rolland** – Policy researcher in emerging technologies and cybersecurity at Virtual Roots

– **Milton Mueller** –

– **Ignacio Castro** – Queen Mary University of London

– **Olga Kyryliuk** – Dr., served on MEG, current chair of the Southeastern European Dialogue on Internet Governance

– **Chelsea Horne** – Senior lecturer at American University in Washington DC

– **Vagisha Srivastava** –

– **Paticipant** – (appears to be a transcription error or unclear speaker identification)

– **Audience** – Various audience members asking questions

**Additional speakers:**

– **Yug Desai** – Joining online, contributed to shaping the program behind-the-scenes

– **Berna Akcali Gur** – Co-organizer of panel (mentioned but not speaking in transcript)

– **Marielle** – Part of Work Package 3 in Remit project, co-presenter with Dennis Redeker

– **Nicola Palladino** – University of Salerno, co-author on digital constitutionalism paper

– **James Shires** – Co-author with Apolline on cybersecurity futures paper

– **Christopher Yu** – University of Pennsylvania

– **Chris** – Audience member asking questions

– **Christopher** – Different audience member from Christopher Yu

– **Alexander Klimberg** – Audience member asking questions about common heritage of mankind principle

– **Alejandro Pisanti** – Remote participant from Mexico City

– **Satish Babu** – Board member of DotAsia organization and member of ALEC ICANN (online participant)

# GIGANET Academic Symposium at IGF 2025: Report

## Executive Summary

The GIGANET Academic Symposium at the Internet Governance Forum 2025 in Oslo featured presentations on emerging technology governance challenges. Chaired by Sophie Hoogenboom as program committee chair, the symposium included three main sessions: a panel on LEO satellites as critical internet infrastructure, presentations from the EU-funded REMIT project on multilateralism and technology governance, and frontier research papers on platform governance and central bank digital currencies.

## Session 1: LEO Satellites as Critical Internet Infrastructure

### International Legal Framework Challenges

Joanna Kulesza from the University of Łódź opened the session by examining international legal challenges surrounding LEO satellites. She highlighted fundamental inadequacies in current governance frameworks, arguing that traditional space law from the 1960s and 1970s struggles to address modern satellite constellations.

Kulesza stated: “maybe this is the time to speak about changing the traditional paradigm for jurisdiction in outer space… We are witnessing jurisdictional challenges and one could say overreaching sovereignty claims from states that merit rediscussing the paradigm we have introduced in mid-1900s.”

She identified specific challenges including jurisdictional conflicts arising from national legislation on outer space resources, cybersecurity vulnerabilities in satellite networks, and data access issues that transcend traditional territorial boundaries.

### Economic and Historical Perspectives

Jonathan Liebenau from the London School of Economics provided economic and historical analysis of LEO satellites, challenging conventional wisdom about their business models. He argued that success depends not solely on subscriber numbers or market pricing, but on government engagement, military applications, and broader economic spillover effects.

Liebenau explained: “the answer for LEOs cannot be limited to how many people use the system or even how high a price the market can bear. The answer will have to come back to the spillover effects and some guess as to what the widespread economic benefits of the system might be over a relatively long period of time.”

His historical analysis revealed that successful satellite constellations require sustained government procurement and military applications rather than relying purely on commercial markets.

### Governance Framework Discussion

Session moderator Jamal Shahin facilitated discussion about potential governance solutions. When the concept of creating an “ICANN for LEOs” was raised, Milton Mueller challenged the idea by asking: “What is it exactly that you are talking about governing? What is the resource and how would decisions be made and how would the authority to make them be established?”

Ignacio Castro from Queen Mary University of London noted minimal presence of satellite companies in current internet governance forums like the IETF, highlighting challenges of integrating new technological actors into existing governance structures.

## Session 2: REMIT Project Presentations

### Project Overview

The REMIT project is an EU-funded Horizon Europe research initiative examining multilateralism and technology governance. Currently in its second year, the project includes six work packages and involves scenario testing workshops scheduled for 2025 in Helsinki, Rome, and Leuven.

### US Foreign Policy Coalition Analysis

Roberta Haar from Maastricht University presented findings on how domestic coalitions shape global technology governance. Her research on US foreign policy identified three distinct coalitions within the Biden administration: New Isolationists, Multilateralists, and Flexilateralists.

Haar’s analysis showed that the Flexilateralist coalition has dominated policy-making. However, Jonathan Liebenau raised methodological concerns, noting that “much of the evidence that you’re using relates to preferences and positions rather than actions and outcomes.”

### Digital Bills of Rights Analysis

Dennis Redeker and Marielle presented analysis of 321 digital bills of rights spanning from 1992 to 2023, identifying four distinct discourse coalitions around human rights, inclusionary rights, security, and content governance. Their research revealed that civil society organisations dominate the discourse, while Global South representation remains limited.

The researchers employed manual coding techniques to analyse the documents. Ignacio Castro suggested that natural language processing tools could complement this approach for enhanced empirical analysis.

### Cybersecurity and Emerging Technologies

Apolline Rolland from Virtual Roots examined how the concept of “emerging technologies” shapes cybersecurity governance. She argued that current assessment tools inadequately capture cybersecurity’s unique characteristics and that the political construction of what counts as “emerging” significantly influences funding priorities.

Rolland stated: “the question should probably not be only on what technologies are emerging, but who decides what gets seen and what gets missed.”

## Session 3: Frontier Research Papers

### Parental Controls and Platform Governance

Chelsea Horne from American University presented research on parental controls across social media platforms, finding significant inconsistencies in implementation. Her analysis examined how platforms strategically shift responsibility from companies to parents while maintaining operational control over key features.

Horne’s research traced the evolution of US legislation on parental controls, showing a shift from technology-focused online safety concerns to crime and law enforcement priorities. She found that platforms like TikTok offer more comprehensive parental controls than competitors like YouTube.

Jamal Shahin characterized this evolution as a “securitisation” process that fundamentally altered the policy landscape.

### Central Bank Digital Currencies and Digital Sovereignty

Vagisha Srivastava examined India’s Central Bank Digital Currency initiative, arguing that strategic and sovereignty concerns outweigh stated inclusion goals. Her analysis revealed that despite official narratives about financial inclusion, the CBDC programme is primarily driven by desires to reduce dependence on US-dominated financial networks.

Srivastava highlighted the challenge of identifying viable use cases for CBDCs when existing digital payment systems like UPI are already successful. She raised significant concerns about privacy and surveillance risks through centralised sovereign ledgers.

## Key Discussions and Questions

### Multi-Stakeholder Governance

Olga Kyryliuk, current chair of the Southeastern European Dialogue on Internet Governance, provided commentary on multi-stakeholder governance limitations. She argued that “multi-stakeholderism is still worth defending, but not uncritically. We need to strengthen it with the safeguards for meaningful participation, mechanisms for accountability, and pathways to translate talk into policy.”

### Research Methodology

Christopher Yu from the University of Pennsylvania emphasized the need for comparative institutional analysis to move from descriptive findings to prescriptive recommendations for better governance design.

The relationship between academic research and policy implementation emerged as a recurring theme, with Kyryliuk noting that “academic research on internet governance needs better integration with policy-making processes to achieve real-world impact.”

## Future Directions

The REMIT project will produce policy recommendations in its final stage, with scenario testing workshops using serious games methodology. Dennis Redeker announced plans for a lightning talk to discuss the digital bills of rights dataset, while Chelsea Horne indicated plans to extend her parental controls study to include additional platforms like Snapchat.

The development of an interactive interface for exploring the digital bills of rights database was mentioned as a way to make research findings more accessible to policy-makers and practitioners.

## Conclusion

The symposium highlighted ongoing challenges in governing emerging technologies, from LEO satellites to digital currencies to platform governance. Speakers consistently identified gaps between technological development and existing governance frameworks, while proposing various approaches for addressing these challenges through improved research methodologies, enhanced multi-stakeholder processes, and new institutional designs.

The discussions demonstrated the complexity of technology governance issues and the need for continued research and policy development to address rapidly evolving technological landscapes.

Sophie Hoogenboom: Hello, everyone. Good morning. My name is Sophie Hoogenboom, and I’m the current chair of the program committee of Giganet. It’s a real pleasure to welcome you all in this year’s Giganet Academic Symposium at the IGF 2025 in Oslo. We’re so glad to have you with us, whether you’re joining us in person or online, and we look forward to the interesting conversations and discussions that lie ahead. I would like to thank, first of all, all the participants of today for bringing your work, your ideas, your curiosity. And I also would like to thank the Giganet steering committee. Given the fact that we only had a few months to prepare after Saudi, I’ve got a lot of help from the steering committee. So thank you. And a very special thank you goes out to Yug Desai, who’s joining us online and unfortunately couldn’t attend in person. His behind-the-scenes efforts have been essential in shaping the program, and so therefore I would like to thank you, Yug. With that, let me welcome you all again, and I hope you will find today’s sessions interesting and inspiring. Thank you. Let’s get started. I will give the floor to the moderator of the first session, Jamal Shahin.

Jamal Shahin: Good morning. It’s great to be in Oslo, and it’s great to be here with a community that is very dear to all of us. My name is Jamal Shahin. Thanks, Sophie, for the introduction. Thanks, Sophie, for the organization of the day’s events. As I said, my name is Jamal Shahin. I’m currently the chair of Giganet. and looking for more members. If there’s anybody here who, by curiosity, stumbled across this and is not a member, please do contact one of us. There are quite a few members of the steering committee here. I’m here to talk about, or I’m here to introduce the panel that is being organized by Berna Akcali Gur and Joanna Kulesza here. Joanna is one of our speakers for today. The panel is titled, From the Tunis Agenda to WSIS plus 20, Pioneering Sustainable Development with Aleo Satellites as Critical Internet Infrastructures. We feel that this is a great way to start the conference, the academic symposium, by talking about the critical internet infrastructures and talking about a new, different dynamic in that discussion that is emerging with the use of internets, of Aleo Satellites as being a space where actually you see a lot of the tensions that are emerging in how do we organize access to the internet and how do we actually make that technologically possible, but also politically and legally possible. And I think our speakers today will help us understand some of the tensions that are there and some of the evolutions that have emerged in this space. Maybe I would just introduce the two speakers. In the program, there were three, but unfortunately our third speaker did have to cancel her participation in today’s event. We hope that everything is fine with her. But I will introduce our two speakers and then we’ll move on to the discussion. And I’m hoping that given we have two speakers, we’ll have plenty of time for discussion and debate. And I will certainly try and come back at the end of the presentations and try and feed in some thoughts into this. So, first of all, we have Jonathan Liebenau now, who is from the London School of Economics. Jonathan will be talking about the evolution of low-Earth orbit satellites historical and economic perspectives. That’s a great way to set the scene for us. And after that, we will have Joanna Kulesza, who is from the University of Łódź, and we will, where Joanna will be talking about international law and LEO satellites, jurisdiction, sovereignty, and human rights. And I think these are all issues that will set up a very interesting day for the entire conference but also will lead to some very interesting discussions from 9.30 onwards or so. Right. Members of the panel, I will pass over the floor to yourselves. Please, you have around, if at about 15 minutes, I’m getting the feeling that you’re still halfway through your narrative. I might start dancing. And then we’ll see from there where the attention goes. Okay. Jonathan, the floor is yours.

Joanna Kulesza: Thank you. Yes, please interrupt me as soon as you get bored. Let me say a couple things of background. I’m an historian of technology originally, and I’ve worked for many years at London School of Economics as a professor of technology management. And I bring both of these perspectives to the study of LEOs and other aspects of space communications infrastructure. And I also think that this is a good way to seriously address the broader question of the panel, which is from Tunis to WSIS plus 20. I’m going to focus on the problem of the governance of internet infrastructure and LEOs in historical and economic perspective with a start with the question, who benefits? Qui bono? To do this, we need… need to have some idea of what the value of the network is, who ascribes value to it, and what relationship the value proposition holds to those who finance it. Now in the early history of infrastructure, systems were mostly private and faced competition, other than roads, which have been mostly public for the past few hundred years in most places. During the 20th century, most infrastructure elements became either sanctioned monopolies or public entities, sometimes through state enterprises, sometimes as public utilities, sometimes using other governance methods. Only towards the late 20th century did liberalization ideals begin to move towards more infrastructure that was private and competitive models. A landmark was the U.S. AT&T telecommunications monopoly, which was broken into competing elements starting with an antitrust case filed by the U.S. Justice Department in 1974, and culminating with the breakup of the system in 1984, followed by the privatization of British Telecom the same year. Large swathes of other telecommunications, energy, water, transportation, and other utilities in Britain and elsewhere were liberalized. The World Trade Organization and the European Union accelerated that trend in the early 2000s, with the wholesale liberalization of telecommunications networks and services. These were not the driving factors behind Tunis, but they are very much, I suggest, an element of background that’s important for what happened since. With early infrastructures, only small numbers of wealthy people could make use of what was on offer. The change occurred when it became clear to industrialized economies that the spillover effects of good quality, universal access, was a major contributor to economic growth. Now, while we might wish to address the value question by measuring the benefits to individuals to capture the logic of an infrastructure that offers cheap access and where extensive or universal service is required, we must consider what these spillover effects might be. This is not an easy measure to come to, partly because infrastructure has become a foundation to the majority of economic activity. We do try to measure these things in all kinds of situations and whenever the London is closed by a tiny bit of snowfall there’s this sense that we have an economic problem to to address and a measure of what that effect might be is made make an effort so we can try to do this but it’s not very precise at all. But the answer for Leos cannot be limited to how many people use the system or even how high a price the market can bear. The answer will have to come back to the spillover effects and some guess as to what the widespread economic benefits of the system might be over a relatively long period of time. We have an idea of

Jonathan Liebenau: what these spillover effects are but it’s much more difficult to measure them in aggregate as opposed to recounting anecdotes or cases which describe their effects. For any investment the critical determinant of value is the time frame in which the price can be amortized, the type of payoff expected and the date upon which the payoff is required. Flaws in dealing with these simple dimensions of finance is sufficient to explain the failures of every preceding Leo project. For the current ones the determinants might have more to do with the critical relationships between government engagement and private sector business models. In particular how procurement of services is going to be handled in the medium term, the value of the spinoffs that might be for government use. military, surveillance, launch services, etc., and what rules get applied for things such as taxation, subsidies, and critically, interconnection pricing. The locus of revenue generation, however differed and the choices made about where premium profits might accrue in relation to where cross subsidies might be used, distinguished the companies and shaped their finances and sometimes their technologies. And in part of my study I went into detail of all of the LEO projects throughout their history. It’s not that long a history so we can get a very clear idea and explain, well since all failed, explain what the different causes of failure have been. These aspects of the financial model and revenue generation is evident, for example, in the choices of LEO constellation configuration or indeed whether the satellites might be placed in medium or geostationary orbits instead of just being limited to a LEO configuration. I understand that Inmarsat, which was the first of the pseudo-commercial geostationary orbit communication services, is being supplemented with LEOs now also. So these kinds of choices get made in configuration based, first and foremost, on what these economic features of the business model are going to be. And it’s evident in what connections are made to, as with Inmarsat maritime or aviation interests, between civil government or military establishments, the technical trade-offs may be somewhat clear between high versus low latency configurations, between expensive heavy powerful payloads versus mini satellites, between broad global coverage versus… orbital geometries that allow services only for densely populated latitudes. Starlink’s initial intention, if Elon Musk’s comments on the opening in 2015 are to be believed, was that it would provide backhaul traffic. And, as he said, about 10% of local business and customer internet traffic. Considering that, at that time and since, the vast majority of traffic’s been carried by undersea cable, this was quite a claim. But the idea was to focus on high-density cities. It was soon estimated to cost $10 billion as a kind of entry fee, and the US Federal Communications Commission offered, and then later revoked, $885.5 million worth of federal subsidies to support rural broadband customers. Nevertheless, revenue seems to have moved from 8 years of losses to a small profit currently, based in large part on a little over 4 million subscribers. These subscribers pay for broadband at various levels of service, but there’s also a business line for the US Space Development Agency for military and dual-use satellites. But this may not continue. Well, when I wrote the first version of this, I cited the fact that competitors like York, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman were getting some of the business that Starlink had expected to get. Since then, three hours after Musk’s insult to Trump, Trump came out with a statement that he was going to take away SpaceX’s contracts. So you can see that the business model is based on… little more idiosyncratic and erratic conditioning than the theory of business models might otherwise have predicted. Nevertheless, military applications for related businesses, especially Starshield, are likely to continue to be closest to the core of this business model. One web has a very different business model, and one particularly dependent on national satellite organizations, in particular that of the UK government, the regional, formerly intergovernmental organization, now liberalized company, Eutelsat, and big investors, including Bharti Global of India and Japan’s SoftBank. It has had satellites in orbit for a little over five years and currently targets governments, including military users, large corporations, and somewhat isolated communities, rather than individual customers, as is the core to the Starlink business model. At the same time that one web began its Leo constellation, Amazon established Kuiper in effect to compete more directly with Starlink. It began launching only late in 2023, and I think the first Kuiper satellites in orbit are very recent, and offers low latency bandwidth connections at prices affordable to many customers, although an important element of the Kuiper business model is its relationship with AWS in supporting the data centers that Amazon runs. So the long-established SES, formerly the Societe European de Satellite, is a publicly quoted company, largely owned by the government of Luxembourg, and is based on a different business model to provide telecommunications network backhaul services for both leading economies in Europe and in the world. economies and emerging economies, services for the hyperscalers, the big data center operators, in particular AWS and Microsoft’s Azure, and a variety of other products such as platforms for digital broadcasting. Its broad customer base and network of medium orbit as well as geostationary satellites puts it in a different competitive position. Unlike the leading Leo firms, SES grew substantially by acquisition and it backs, for example, O3B along with Google and investors, HSBC, and some leading asset management companies well. I keep on compiling lists of all the asset management companies that are invested in the digital economy and it’s the same list of leading BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard. So we see the same investors. The fact that that group of investors clearly has a shared set of incentives is an extremely important element of the story about the relationship between the characteristics of these investors and the business models that emerge in the cases. At the end, we come to the core economic problem, which we can frame around the simplest definition of economics, which is the distribution of scarce resources. Its starting point is a determination of the costs in relations to the benefit of the system. We’ve seen the basic entry cost is on the order of $10 billion and the most common beneficiaries are either investors who expect to make profits through revenues or through the sale of the business, entrepreneurial exit. The other kind of beneficiary would be those who can utilize satellites for a related purpose such as national governments who expect returns through economic growth. major commercial users of Internet, such as Amazon with Kuiper, who benefit both by the infrastructure components for their AWS business and through extending Internet access to more customers for their e-commerce business. So the targets for revenue have not changed in type very much, but they have changed in scale since Internet access has dramatically widened and even more significantly traffic has boomed and since the hyperscalers have become an important element of the business. This has incentivized the business models based on individual and small group access, on business supply chain customers, and on governments. At this point, it’s appropriate to remind ourselves that there’s a balance that needs to be struck between the commercial and the national interests. This is both because the national interests will eventually determine the rules of the game, but also because governments constitute a crucial and, in some cases, the dominant source of revenue for the companies. It’s rarely an easy circle to square and it’s a difficult situation for the companies to do the kind of long-term planning that the financing bodies would expect, especially now that we see how volatile the state of SpaceX might be. So we need to consider what these elements of functionality of the systems are in relation to the costs and go back to this question about who benefits and what kind of trade-offs those beneficiaries are making. One critical consideration that’s sometimes forgotten in this kind of analysis is the extent to which the characteristics of the use of digital services affect the cost. affect a national economy. And this can be done by approximating the digital intensity of the sectors that make up the characteristics of that economy. For example, clearly some sectors are entirely reliant on data and associated services, such as banking and finance, online services and entertainment, e-commerce. Other sectors are reliant to some degree, but not as great an extent. Retail, export, others are far less dependent on digitalization for their basic functioning, even if digital accounts and communications are commonplace. These include many of the primary sectors, such as agriculture, mining, and fisheries. So a country such as Britain, which is heavily reliant on banking and finance, has a great deal more to gain from advanced widespread digitalization than a country largely reliant on small-scale farming and oil and gas. For Egypt, the country with large, occasionally restive population and an authoritarian government, the priorities of the army prevail. So there are trade-offs necessary between, say, privacy and surveillance, or between unencumbered international data exchange and internal control. The loss of economic advantages that occur from advanced data infrastructure for a country like Egypt is small in proportion to their current source of GDP. For a country such as Norway, lack of access to advanced data infrastructure would be a major disadvantage. Some countries sacrifice little by prioritizing uneconomic practices. Others are effectively forestalling economic ambitions, while for others, it’s an effectively unthinkable to lose any opportunity afforded by effective data infrastructure components. So I see this as the general background. and I hope in the discussion we can come back to the relationship between our governance concerns and these two features which we can see as a theme of what I’ve been expressing. One is that as characteristics of infrastructure we have to consider who the beneficiaries are exactly and how they receive that benefit and at what cost, what trade-offs. The second is that given the diversity of governance and business models, regulatory powers should be used to forestall foreseeable conflicts including things like state enacted functions such as universal access and unbridled rent-seeking behavior. So I’ll leave my initial comments there and hope we can pick up on these two points about the characteristics of infrastructure and the significance of these governance models for specific regulatory powers that can and should be apply.

Jamal Shahin: Thank you very much Jonathan. I think there plied. are many interesting issues that you’ve raised in your presentation and I look forward to helping the discussion and go along those lines. But before we do that I think it’s best if I pass the floor over to Joanna to immediately start your presentation. Okay.

Joanna Kulesza: I’m more than happy to do that Jamal. Thank you so much. Thank you for the kind introduction and thank you for allowing Berna and myself to propose this panel. I have prepared a few slides. My understanding is that they are visible to our audience and there’s a little clicker to your left that I might wish to use. Thank you so much. Just to be more self-sufficient. Thank you again. Thank Thank you for this opportunity to speak on a critical component of Internet governance, one might argue, that is Internet infrastructure, most significantly, as Jonathan elaborately emphasized with regards to relatively novel components thereof. Today for the 15 minutes, I’ll try to squeeze this into 15 minutes. Please stop me if I go over time. I have been given a tall order to speak about international law, jurisdiction, sovereignty, and human rights. We all know this is a 90-minute lecture. I shall prevent that from happening. Our reason for proposing this session, amongst others, was this declaration that you see before yourselves, or maybe more specifically, an input document to what will happen in two weeks at the ITU, the WSIS Plus 20 Summit. We met with a group of expert colleagues working on LEOs, on satellites, on connectivity, including colleagues from the Internet Society in Łódź, for an exciting week to talk about satellites. And we have decided that the most pertinent avenue to pursue was indeed the WSIS Plus 21. So, there’s an input document that we are hoping will facilitate the discussions in Geneva in a couple of weeks’ time, that I will try to pick themes from today, just to offer them for discussion here. Berna and myself, together with other distinguished authors, would be thrilled if you gave the document a glance, a read. I’m thrilled to say that Jonathan joined us in Łódź for an insightful intervention and supported the document itself. You will find the names of the authors reiterated there. I have a close-up of the document, there you go, so you can see it more clearly. There are a few points here, including the ones that you see in the title of this intervention, and I will try to focus on them. Traditionally, I should probably start with the introduction, but luckily for me, Jonathan has done a wonderful job explaining why Leos are at a critical junction. The technology has been known for decades, but now it enjoys a significant increase in interest for reasons economic and beyond. So we are looking at a shift in internet governance towards infrastructure that has been prophesied by our distinguished Giganet colleagues at least a few decades before. This is happening before our eyes. So the reason why we have chosen Leos as the theme for that specific dedicated WSIS plus 20 input is threefold. First, we are witnessing a technological evolution happening before our eyes. Second, we see increasing developmental trends that Jonathan elaborated on very eloquently. And third, the private actors are gaining significant power, significant control. Maybe this is the time to speak about changing the traditional paradigm for jurisdiction in outer space. And I emphasize that question mark. Now, you could say this is nothing new. We have been regulating outer space for decades. We have an extensive international legal framework, and you see the three key components of that international legal framework before you. So you could say the jurisdictional issues are well answered. There are no issues with sovereignty. We know what it is. We have been implementing this for decades. Nothing new under the sun. I think that in this room, that statement might prove controversial. We have experts who are well aware that that is by far not the case. For example, if we look at jurisdiction, it would be the article eight of the outer space treaty that attaches jurisdiction to the place of launch, respectively, if the place of launch happens to be, for example, the U.S., U.S. would then have the authority to govern the activities of that given object. Possibly, if there is liability attached to that object, U.S. jurisdiction would apply as well. Now, this very simple paradigm is being contested, which reflects the framework of Article 8 as probably not being perfectly sufficient for our discussions in 2025. It attaches control based on this very traditional concept of jurisdiction attached to a state, whereas this also introduces issues, for example, of forum shopping. But most significantly, we are looking at liability that is being attached to the space, to the state of launch itself. We’re witnessing an increasing role of private actors. Hence, we are thinking forever more about a multi-stakeholder challenge to this governance impacting the discussions happening at WSIS plus 20 in the following weeks. So, as we do progress, we are looking at issues that are attached to this dated framework that, on one hand, as mentioned already, are reflective of the flags of convenience challenges we’ve witnessed in other international spaces like the open sea, for example. The jurisdictional attribution here is based on territoriality, whereas we see states trying to reach more of a functional arrangement, particularly by introducing national laws. I have a few examples here for the purpose of time. I’m just going to try and go through them quickly. But one could say the default in this legal framework is for states not to hold national appropriation, whereas if you review just three examples that I have here, you can see that there is a lot of you will see that states are indeed trying to overreach beyond that traditional jurisdictional framework. All the way back in 2015, the US was the first country to introduce a respective national legal framework that might be perceived as challenging that jurisdictional arrangement. Then we’ve seen both Luxembourg and the UAE following suit. So the question is whether we should work on a more consolidated jurisdictional framework, whether the one we have in place is enough, or whether a completely different approach might be better suited to address these contemporary challenges. I will just very briefly go through those legal acts for the lawyers in the room who might be interested, and we might have the time to circle back to these in the Q&A. But just to give you maybe a closer understanding, a closer view of what we’re dealing with, the 2015 US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, thoroughly analyzed by colleagues working on outer space law allows, for example, for the ownership of outer space assets that have been mined by private companies. One could view that as contradictory to the original jurisdictional arrangement, but this is indeed happening right before our eyes. You would see, as already said, an intense debate around this. There’s a lot of literature, just a very brief recap visible on your screens right now. The Luxembourgian approach is relatively similar. We are again witnessing an attempt to maybe territorialize or give a more national focus to the governments of outer space resources. You would see companies domiciled in Luxembourg that are allowed to extract their own resources. Again, if you’re looking for the specific legal act, it is visible on your screens right now. And finally, probably the most interesting approach is the one of the United Arab Emirates. The most recent legal arrangement of 2023 focuses on space activities and the- UAE would be offering the most comprehensive regulation available thus far. The law is visible before yourselves as of right now. So we are witnessing jurisdictional challenges and one could say overreaching sovereignty claims from states that merit rediscussing the paradigm we have introduced in mid-1900s, 1960s, 1970s. We are witnessing the increase of LEO reliance for global broadband. The issues to be discussed primarily focus on market access issues. This is a game for the big players. We see well-developed states having a say in how these issues will be regulated, but not so much, I apologize, there we go, but not so much with regards to the smaller players who rely on the infrastructure that is being offered there. And then finally, an issue we found of most significant importance is the question of cross-border data flows. So we would be looking at authority grab by those offering the infrastructure and having access to data, claiming national cybersecurity, national security issues, and accessing the data as per their national roles rather than looking for any international arrangement to be introduced. So these three issues prioritize the need for discussing a more complex jurisdiction to jurisdictional framework. We look at this point at the extraterritorial application of laws. We are witnessing data localization laws being introduced. China is the perfect example. Chinese national cybersecurity law allows for access to data within infrastructure managed by that country. So if we were looking at low-Earth orbit infrastructures offered by China, there is a likelihood that that data could be accessed by the country authorities themselves, but this is clearly not a… Chinese issue. We’ve seen this with Starlink and SpaceX as well. The data approaches might result in conflict of laws and eventually enforcement challenges. I do have a specific example to discuss how criminal law investigations might be stalled by this unclear jurisdictional framework behind data access. Cybersecurity has indeed been the leading cause for states trying to regulate internet infrastructure, low earth orbit satellites included. States are concerned that the Leos might be the weakest link in their networks and they’re trying to ensure that vulnerabilities will be mitigated. In the cybersecurity realm, when we speak about application of international law, one of the hot topics has always been attribution and responsibility. Data access is vital for the purpose of attributing responsibility. So who has the data has the authority, has the power here. We could look to the UN and the wonderful work that has been done around cybersecurity. We have the group of governmental experts emphasizing in 2015 that international law applies offline and online, hence any internet infrastructure would be governed by the United Nations Charter. We are witnessing the final report of the open-ended working group being prepared as we speak. So one could look into those processes and say, well, we’ve done so much in cybersecurity, we could easily apply it to these networks as well. This brings us to a relatively specific arrangement in the Outer Space Treaty on the prohibition of military uses of outer space. So one could say again, we don’t need a specific framework because everything that needs to be said is in Article 4 of the Outer Space Treaty. Outer space is not to be used for military purposes. This has probably been the leading theme for research also with regards to digital sovereignty. And I’m just going to emphasize the wonderful work done by also GIGNET colleagues elsewhere. There is a manual on international law that is applicable to military uses of outer space. The Milimus project completed almost a decade ago. So we do have a detailed framework of how outer space should not be used for military purposes. And this brings me to the last theme. Yes, sir. And yes, I did. Thank you so much. That’s the Milimus project. There you go. And this brings me to the last theme I wanted to highlight, which are human rights issues. We were hoping that Roxana might cover those in more detail. But again, this might be an issue for us to cover in a discussion. You could say, well, data is not really a problem because specifically here in Europe, we do have the GDPR and we are very proud of its extraterritorial effect. We speak very proudly of the Brussels effect, the GDPR shaped global thinking about personal data protection, a vital component of data collection one might have. And we also have the Convention 108 from the Council of Europe. So data protection is covered. We applied also to extraterritorial networks. That might be the case. But my favorite example to counter that paradigm is this one. If you’re following news regarding internet infrastructures, there is a growing debate around the fact that starlinks are being used by organized crime. And that challenge has been discussed recently. For example, during the Council of Europe Octopus Conference, we see organized crime using low earth orbit satellites, reliant infrastructures to make sure that their data is not as easily accessible to law enforcement officials as it could be. And Erin West has been doing a wonderful job. She’s a U.S. prosecutor trying to highlight that criminal networks focused on, I don’t like the term, but the professional term is pig butchering, are using low earth orbit satellites and internet connectivity to make sure. that their business is done in more privacy, if you will. So this is the link with cybersecurity and human rights. We might wish to have a framework that will allow us to access that data easily. Finally, the last issue that was highlighted in the theme of my intervention here is the question of connectivity and indigenous and marginalized populations access. Clearly, there’s a sustainability theme. The Tunis agenda promised us that we would be granted a sustainable internet access. And this is the time to review that promise. Have we indeed been able to introduce an international framework that allows for equitable access also to those in marginalized or indigenous communities? In the paper, we still encourage you to give a brief read. We highlight that this is probably one of the vital issues to be addressed by the WSIS. Now, just to wrap this up, the environmental and sustainability issues clearly also include space debris and ethical mass deployments, implying that there are ethical considerations to be made. The increasing role of private actors facilitates the need to think about how we govern these critical internet infrastructures. Right now, we’re looking at a classical multilateral network that is built around international treaties. But maybe this is a time to shift the focus more to private actors, just to ensure, for example, transparency. One of the exercise we have done was to speak with Chinese colleagues on the way that China manages their critical infrastructures, both lower orbit satellites and undersea cables. You can find the report here. And this highlights very different approaches between different regions to critical internet infrastructures. Now, finally, maybe, and this is… is up for discussion during an Internet Governance Academic Network meeting, we might indeed request for a more transparent and more multi-stakeholder-focused framework for internet infrastructure, slower-to-orbit satellites included. This is the time to have that conversation. During different events, we’ve had the opportunity to present this work. The idea of an icon for Leos came up. I love that idea. I would love to hear your feedback on this. Are we ready for a multi-stakeholder framework for internet infrastructures? Should the WSIS plus 20 look into it? Or maybe this is a very different environment, and the model that we’ve used following the Tunis agenda promise is not appropriate to face the cybersecurity and data access challenges of 2025. I will try to very quickly come to a conclusion. The work that you see in the document is based on a series of case studies. We’ve looked at the way that Starlink was provided in Ukraine. We’ve looked, as already said, at the work done by Chinese colleagues. We’ve looked at OneWeb. So the recommendations themselves focusing on the need to rediscuss jurisdictional frameworks and sovereignty are grounded in that research. I’m more than happy to answer specific questions. Eventually, maybe we do have work we might wish to follow. The work on cybersecurity through the United Nations, but also through regional networks, has resulted in 11 norms of responsible state behavior. These are clearly applicable also to cyberspace infrastructures we’re discussing here today. Just as a brief reminder, this is what they look like. They are rooted in international law, but it is by far a more operationalized framework that is focused on confidence-building measures. So maybe that is the path for us to follow to ensure that the aims of the… Tunis agenda are met with the use of international law as well. Last but not least, for conclusions, let me emphasize we are witnessing an increase in legal tensions focused around low-Earth-orbit satellites and critical Internet infrastructures. The session today is a call for enhanced international cooperation, not just multi-stakeholder but probably also intergovernmental, and we are at a UN venue. It seems we have a lot of work done on international law and how it applies to critical Internet infrastructures. This is the time to make it more harmonized and operational. And with that, I think it’s 15 minutes. I thank you. Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.

Jamal Shahin: Thank you very much. Thank you to both of our speakers. In this very strange silent conference format, I’m now being asked, well, no, I’m now going to ask you if there are questions. I believe that people who are sitting down far below us, hello, everybody. If you would like to ask questions, there are mics on the side or you can just come and sit with the rest of the people up on stage. I would like to just briefly kind of make some comments. This has been really interesting to see how we start in this space looking at the way that satellites are core to certain operations, not core to certain operations. I was really intrigued, Jonathan, by your kind of differentiation between how you can say, well, some countries need LEO satellites more than others. Some countries need this advanced data infrastructure. And I’m wondering how that plays into the sort of UN discourses about equality of access and equality of infrastructures and things. So that might be one way to think of this, specifically when you’re talking about sustainable development and the ability to then move forward to that level. And Joanna, you achieved what you wanted to do, I think. You went through the jurisdictional, the sovereignty, the legal, the political aspects here. I think this is, you know, the call that you’re making at the end is really worthwhile in the sense of let’s have this conversation about where do we need to take these questions on satellites and where do they sit in terms of the international norms or the international frameworks that we actually want to work with. I was also thinking that, yeah, a lot of this is an echo of the discussions we’ve been having about landline-based infrastructures for a long time, so I think that there’s a lot that we can draw also from that kind of space. So, you know, I find this an interesting time to be having this discussion, as you said, if we’re now thinking towards the future, what kind of frameworks will we be working in, and I can imagine that there’s quite some opportunities for conversation around the room. But I see that we have some people who are obviously very keen to talk who’ve moved up. I’ve taken up more than enough time. Can I have a show of hands? And I will also look online, but I will start in this direction because I saw Chris, if that’s okay with everybody, I’ll start in this direction and go around. I’ll give you a couple of minutes or a minute to ask your question, but we’ll collect a couple for the panellists, if that’s okay.

Audience: I’m not using headphones. It’s very liberating. So this is fascinating, and forgive me, I was slightly late into Jonathan’s presentation due to the enormous queues for security at the door, and the incredible distance between the door and here. So I haven’t looked at this since looking at broadcasting regulation in the mid and late 90s and actually back at LSE and being treated to the endless expense account of Dennis Gilhooly at Teledesic. So it really interests me to know, is the transformation just the money is here in greater numbers or rather the market is here? And then the second question I had for Joanna is, so of course Luxembourg is just a German bank offshore, the UAE is just an Anglo-American but British bank really offshore. And so I just wonder whether it’s possible to find out, I guess it probably is, which American or British lawyer wrote the UAE treaty, because obviously there’s no real parliament involved, and it would just be fascinating to interview them and find out what they were doing. And I think, you know, you talk about letting, you know, thinking about things more in terms of private actors, I mean, you know, you don’t get much more private governments than the UAE and Luxembourg, so they’re already here, aren’t they? But I’m really, really interested in the development of this, because I haven’t really touched on this for, oh my God, 25 years, which dates all of us. And a fascinating presentation, thank you.

Jamal Shahin: Well, we’ll do a round, because we have 12 minutes, and I would really like to get as many questions in as possible. And thank you. Please.

Audience: Hello, Alexander Klimberg for the record. Thank you for those wonderful presentations, I found them very interesting, and my question goes both to Joanna, but also anyone else who wants to respond. For a number of years, I’ve been looking at the application of the common heritage of mankind principle to internet infrastructures, and of course that principle was first established with Jungklaus. and then Outer Space Treaty, where it’s common interest of mankind instead of common heritage of mankind, and many people said it was kind of dead because it was based on the lack of governments or other parties’ ability to exploit the resources that were being protected. But now, of course, with the International Seabed Authority suddenly becoming relevant after 40 years and the UN High Seas Treaty effectively putting the common heritage of mankind principle front and center, my question is, is there a chance that we can actually expand this to the issue that, of course, I was connected with, which is the protection of the public core of the Internet and other ways of looking at digital public infrastructure in a more global way. So I’d be very interested to see if the current discussion in Outer Space Treaty is going in a direction that might reinforce CHM as the UN High Seas Treaty is doing, and if we can extend that to discussions about Internet governance. Thank you.

Jamal Shahin: Thank you, Alexander. We have one person online as well, but I’m going to pass to the next three speakers here, and then we’ll go to Alejandro online. Okay.

Audience: So I’m Christopher Yu, for the record. Always a pleasure. Jonathan, love your work. Quickly, you mentioned rent-seeking. I find there’s two things on my mind for you. One is rent-seeking. To me, it works both ways. A lot of local countries are using control of undersea landing stations and backhaul monopolies to replace hard currency they lost from settlements from international calls, and there’s a dynamic there, and often look at the entry of a new provider as a chance to extract money in terms of service provision. I’m curious to see to the extent to which that factors your analysis. And you mentioned the different business models. It’s a question of pursuing different ones would fit with different types of technologies, but on a business standpoint, doesn’t it make sense for them to do heterogeneous business models? I mean, my natural instinct is to say which one’s likely to be best, but the answer is you’d expect if one person uses one business model, the other person uses a different one, another second actor, and then… be interesting to see if that plays in. Joanna, on your point, I’m fascinated by your discussion of China, because in mentioning data localization is one thing, but on the other aspects, you talk about licensing, launch, and sustainability. And one of the frustrations we’ve had is the incomplete, if you will, participation of Russia and China in launch registration. And so to me, the different aspects beyond the data localization, it puts a limit on multilateral solutions if people don’t fully participate, and particularly with the lack of well-defined property rights in terms of obligations there. And the other thing is the other aspect you were mentioning about data flows is the potential revolutionary aspects of direct-to-phone, which is with the ability to go to direct-to-phone, Iran hates this, because there’s no base station, earth station you can track anymore. And so on some level, you talked about problems with data localization. On the other hand, on a human rights standpoint, there are potentially huge benefits. And in terms of accessibility, we’re talking about in the US now a cap on universal service at $1,400, which is the cost of Starlink. And so now we’re putting an upper bound on what you need to connect people, and it’s potentially hugely beneficial to people in extremely remote areas. I’m wondering how you strike that balance. Before moving on and taking additional questions,

Jamal Shahin: I’m just wondering, how is your capacity to respond? You want to answer now, or you want to move? OK. Maybe Milton, if we could just pause on the questions for one sec. I’ll give you three minutes in total to respond to those, and then we can come back to the next questions, OK?

Jonathan Liebenau: OK. Chris and Christopher. Chris spoke first. Why now? So some of it has to do with cost, yes. Certainly launch cost is dramatically less, so entry cost is low. So, when I was trying to figure out what the entry cost was, I thought $10 billion was a rather small amount of money for entry into LEOS. Of course, the costs mount up, and that’s not to compare Kuiper’s entry cost with Starlink’s entry cost. But, you know, yes, cost is lower. But it was 25 years ago or more that the small, cheap satellites were being developed. Starry, for example, was already producing quite cheap. So, I think it does come down to the difference between then and now, to the spillover effects. That is, the economic value of using data infrastructure, which has to do with the dissemination of large-scale usages, e-commerce, complete transformation of military usage, and other things that go beyond the kind of telecoms model, which still prevailed 25 years ago as basic, you know, with earth-sensing and other such functions on top. So I think that that’s part of it. The main point I wanted to make about data intensity of industrial sectors is that the structure of an economy will be a significant determinant as to what the tradeoffs are going to be on how you want to play the game. And so it shouldn’t surprise us that a country like Egypt, or indeed Turkey, or a number of other countries that have authoritarian governments, are happy to pay the price, Egypt more so than Turkey, because Turkey’s a more diversified and industrialized economy, but happy to pay the price of servicing the requirements of the government or the military or civil order as they see it. Um, because, uh, it’s not as if the financial sector or e-commerce is a major contributor to the GDP in those countries. So I think those things need- and this is, of course, an explanation of why a one-size-fits-all model shouldn’t be expected. It may or may not be demanded, but it shouldn’t be expected. Christopher, the rent-seeking arguments, um, you’re right. Uh, I- I didn’t take into account, uh, settlement, uh, costs, and I think that that’s a really interesting element. It should be relatively straightforward to model now that we think of it, um, but it along with other kinds of, uh, inputs into rent-seeking, um, that are specific. So in- in a sense, the digital intensity by sector in relation to structure of the economy is the framing of some of that problem, but the specific element of interconnection costs and settlement is- is interesting. And of course, heterogeneity, I guess we regard heterogeneity as a general good. It’s generally a good thing, uh, for any kind of, uh, system to have heterogeneity. And, um, uh, unfortunately, I think we are in danger of losing a considerable amount of heterogeneity by the way in which competition policy is working to allow too-big-to-fail giants in- in- in dominating, um, a wide range of practices. I would say that the- the- the three main big segments of the economic models are going to be probably first and foremost data centers. associated infrastructure that is trying to deal with that 6% or so that’s not carried by undersea cables now, but have certain advantages to move away from undersea cables. The second is military, and the third is the way in which local commercial services like e-commerce might be differentially benefited by LEO constellations. But there again, we can see that one size is not going to fit all.

Joanna Kulesza: Great, just very briefly, with three minutes remaining until the end of the session, I’m going to start with Christopher’s comment. Thank you so much for that. I think we do agree that the multilateral arrangement is not perfect, and we might wish to work on amending it. I fully agree with you, we don’t see enough of cooperation among states, hence the call for maybe rearranging that paradigm. Data localization I think is the part that we can actually put our finger on, and we know what’s happening, whereas the outer space existing arrangements are by far not sufficient. So I think we do agree on that point, but I’m happy to follow up offline, if you will. I like the argument of the direct-to-phone connectivity. I think that is the way of the future. It’s not there yet, but it’s still the question of access to data, at which point it is going to happen. If we lose the underground stations, there will still be the outer space infrastructure that might allow for access to data. So even if we lose that link, the question might still be there. I don’t have a good answer on balancing privacy and security, and with all due respect, I don’t think anyone has. It is closely related to national sovereignty concerns, and that’s for states to decide, unless we intervene and we tell them that there is a different balance to be struck. I hope that answers your queries, but I’m more than happy to have that conversation. Thank you so much for the comment. I’m going to move to Alex. Lovely to see you. I apologize, it’s my eyesight. I did not recognize you there. It’s wonderful to see, and I appreciate the comment. The work of the Global Commission on the stability of cyberspace has been fundamental to better understanding what the public core of the internet might be. I love those arguments. I know that Dennis’s 10th anniversary volume is coming out, so there’ll be more academic discourse. I regret to say I have not seen an international legal discourse on including the public core of the internet, if you will, as defined by the Global Commission into the common heritage of mankind narrative, but this is a very timely discussion for us to have. So this is our call to maybe raise it in Geneva in two weeks’ time, isn’t it? So I believe there is room for that conversation to happen. Regretfully, I don’t have anything to report to say yes, this is a valid concern we see being discussed at UN venues. I don’t consider myself an outer space law expert. I only do the little part that deals with internet infrastructures, so there might be better informed colleagues either here in the room or online who would be better equipped to answer if there is a thread of hope. Unfortunately, I’m not the one to shed that light of hope onto that discussion, but I do appreciate the intervention. Thank you so much for flagging it. And this brings me to Chris’s question. As an international lawyer at a UN venue, I would never have the courage to claim that neither Luxembourg nor UAE are non-sovereign states, but thank you for raising that. I think that’s what I heard, but that’s a question of communicating, right? So I actually know colleagues who worked on those drafts. I’ll follow up. I don’t have a specific answer to you, but I think it is a very insightful piece of legislation that predicted the evolution. I do agree with you, it’s business friendly, if you will, or private actors friendly, but then again, why not? We see bigger countries and bigger powers, as Jonathan gave examples here, also focusing on facilitating private actors the best that they can. So it’s also a conversation for me to follow up. I’m more than happy to ask questions to colleagues and then report back with more details on what motivated them to introduce that unique piece of legislation. That’s the best answer I could give at this point. Thank you so much for the question though, Chris.

Jamal Shahin: Okay, oh, thank you, Sophie. I was just gonna beg for another minute. We have three questions. I would propose that we do take the questions that we have, but that we really try and keep our responses brief because otherwise follow on effects, knock on effects, whatever. Milton.

Milton Mueller: Sure, I had several questions, but I will focus on one, which was about the ICANN for Leos. So I want to sort of bring some reality to that question. So ICANN was created because there was a centralized registry for names, numbers, and protocol parameters that could be somehow the point of governance. And there was a debate because there was no existing apparatus for governing that other than the IETF. So when you talk about an ICANN for Leos, what is it exactly that you are talking about governing? What is the resource and how would decisions be made and how would the authority to make them be established? Well, one can think of the radio frequency spectrum as being a point of leverage, but it’s hard to imagine the nation states giving that up. One could imagine launching, I don’t know. It’s just like when people talk about that, what exactly are they talking about establishing this new institution for?

Ignacio Castro: Ignacio Castro from Queen Mary University of London for the record. And thank you for the presentation and for the question because my question is a follow up on yours. I was wondering up to what extent do we need to create a multi-stakeholder body for satellites or do we need to bring them satellites to exist in multi-stakeholder bodies? For example, the IETF where I barely see presence of any satellites companies, some, not some. much from what I know, but I could be wrong. And related to that is what leverage do we actually have to do that and how that will change and the need to do so as the business cases and competition in the satellite sector increases.

Jamal Shahin: Thank you. Okay, I would like to just now give the floor to Alejandro who is online and then I think that will be all the questions.

Audience: Thank you, Chair. Can you hear me? Yes. Alejandro Pisanti here in Mexico City. It’s 15 minutes past 2 a.m. I would seriously commend all chairs of the panels and workshops in the IGF to give priority to remote connected participants who are unfunded and very often in the Americas at least working at ungodly hours. Coming also on the point of an icon for Leos, the question upon my reply builds upon Milton’s and Castro’s. Once you decide or once you know what you want to govern, what you really need to govern, you have to find a way to convene to sort of force convening the actors and to make them pay for the thing. What has happened over years and also outside the domain name system is that you’d rather scare the private powerful actors, let’s say by finding that they are violating antitrust laws, competition laws, or something else, and you have to have a set of stakeholders that’s not already at the table. At the table are already the operators and the governments and intergovernmental organizations, but stakeholders like the Astronomical Union are very marginal in the ITU and for example they are very concerned about the ill effects of the satellites. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Jamal Shahin: Two second responses. Should we have an ICANN for Leo’s? I think that’s your paper, so.

Joanna Kulesza: I think we all agree we’re not ready and I welcome these responses. We’ve actually pitched that question also to Jonathan and he has notes. I wouldn’t be willing to share the floor, but this is just for me to say that’s the feedback we have received, right? Let’s have a multi-stakeholder model with ICANN being the paradigm. I’m not ready to write that paper because I’m not sure what that would look like. If we go into multi-stakeholderism, I’m not sure what it is that we would want to take from the ITU. Maybe it would be the radio frequencies, but I don’t see a central point that we could use the ICANN paradigm. And ICANN is dealing with its own issues, right? We’re debating multi-stakeholderism per se. So WSIS plus 20 is the moment to have that conversation. If there are those who have a clearer picture that sort of we hear speaking up at conferences, I would love to hear more. But with that, I would also share the floor with Jonathan because I know he has devoted some thinking to this, and that’s the second two seconds we’re going to ask for. Thank you so much.

Jamal Shahin: Thank you, Julie, please, very quick.

Jonathan Liebenau: Okay, I did write a long set of notes on exactly this question, mainly to get my own mind around it. I’m very much on the same wavelength as Milton in particular, the comments that you made. I think that the first question is whether the multi-stakeholder model makes sense, especially in relation to the incumbent organizations that are occupying territory in this now. So where does it stand in relation to them? Does it override them? Does it supplement them? If it supplements, then what kind of power relations might be related? I’m rather pessimistic about the idea, but it’s worth exploring, especially to address those who are more committed to the concept of multi-stakeholder models. than I am, so that we can have a proper discussion and just think about governance from first principles and the extent to which multi-stakeholder model is just one other form of governance, not necessarily a dualistic possibility, right? So it’s either there or not. Thanks.

Jamal Shahin: Great. It’s good that there will be a to be continued on this panel. Thank you very much. Thank you to our panelists. Thank you to the questioners. Thank you to the online participants. I will now cede the chair to Tricia, who’s going to come and take my place and keep much better time. Thank you very much, everybody.

Trisha Meyer: I will invite the speakers of the next panel to join me up here, as well as just for the people who have ended up sitting over there, if you want to join on stage, there really is no hierarchy, no order. You are very welcome to join here as well, which makes interventions easier for you. We will take two, three minutes to set up. So also, if you need that cup of coffee or something, you can go ahead and get that while we get set up for the next panel. Thank you. In the interest of time, I think we will get started with the second panel of the GIGNET annual symposium. If I can invite everyone who does not have their headphones on, who therefore cannot hear me, to sit down. All right. I shouted camera off, mic off. The second panel today discusses the state of multilateralism and internet governance from a long-term perspective. The research is part of an EU-funded Horizon Europe research project on multilateralism and technology governance called RISE. remit, and the panel is entitled Mapping the Politics of Global Technology Governance from Domestic Coalitions to Global Norms. We have three papers, as well as a discussant who will, from my understanding, you’ll intervene after the three panels, the three papers have been presented. The presenters have ten minutes each, and the slides should be appearing up on screen as well. I take the note from the previous Q&A that I will take remote participants’ questions first when we get to that point in the panel. So with that, I would like to first issue a, I’m not going to apologize, but there is a baby here, so as a chair I will be kind of both doing timekeeping as well as child care juggling, but just so everyone is aware that we have a young IGF member here with us as well. All right. With that, I will pass on to the first speaker, Rumba Charhar, and my understanding is that you will also introduce the remit project. Thank you. The floor is yours.

Roberta Haar: Thank you very much, Trisha. I hope we can have some slides already. Is that possible? The first presentation? Yeah, so good morning, everyone. I’m very pleased that we have some people in the audience. My name is Dr. Roberta Haar, and I am the PI of an EU consortium called Remit. And today we’re going to have three papers from our research and quite diverse papers. We have six work packages, three content work packages, and you’ll definitely see an element of each one of those work packages. So I want to give you this morning a little bit of brief report of what we’ve done. So we’re in our second year. We just finished our second year of the consortium project. And we had a very good report from the E.U. Commission and two independent evaluators. The report just came last week, and we had flying colors. But we had also a conference last year in Leuven, which was very well attended and very successful. And so I have some photos from that as well. So it is a – our project is in response to an eHorizon call for multilateralism and transnational democracy. And the way that we interpreted that was through strategic technologies, emerging technologies. And then you see there the different – the overall scope of what we looked at. And we had four main domains of technology. And the next slide that I will show you, then also the specific technologies that we’re looking at, and then how we tackled it all. So I myself am a researcher in the consortium, and I’m in the geopolitics part, which will be my paper that you’ll see – that you’ll see next. And you see that we have – we’re quite broad, which also reflects the content of our papers this morning. So these are the technologies. You can see we have digital and quite an array there. The ones that we crossed out were the ones that we had proposed to the commission, but that we didn’t actually go forward with them. But you see that we are – we have been quite extensive, and we have been quite extensive in the type of ways that we have developed to access these technologies. And I will talk about that in a later slide. So the work package one that I’m leading, with some help at Maastricht University where I’m based, we are monitoring and coordinating the project. Work package two, which I’m also leading, is the methodological part. And Dennis, who’s sitting beside me, he helps me in that. He’s the data management guy. He’s proposed the plan. I’ve been putting together a stakeholder contact list. And then also I made a handbook, which is on the methodology that we’re using in the consortium, which is the advocacy coalition framework, which is more of a – associated with public policy, but we’re using it in foreign policy and all kinds of things, mapping out coalitions, finding out who is working in policy areas and the different policy subsystems, what do they believe, what policy do they want. So that’s really the under, the foundational part of the research that we’re doing. And that’s very evident in the research that I have done that I will present to you also this morning. And then you see that we have been also developing, you see there I have scenario testing workshops and we’ve also developed a serious game, the Scenario Exploration System, which we’ve done with the Joint Research Center of the EU Commission. And I will show you that, here’s a slide of that. So we have people there, we developed, through the data that we have developed, we put it into a game, a serious game. And we’ve already played it now twice with some very positive results. We’re also trying to bring our data more alive in scenarios. And so we did a lot, so we developed it, we did some testing, I tested it in Cluj-Napoca with our partner there in Romania, also tested it with among students in Maastricht. So we’re really developing this innovative aspect of understanding our data. And the reviewers thought it was very innovative and a very good way of learning about what we’ve produced. Our Work Package 3, this is a normative construction. Of course, Dennis is the lead in Work Package 3 and he’s going to share his research with you today. Marielle is also part of that, who’s also on our panel today, part of that Work Package. But you see that they were also last year, or two years ago at the IGF in Kyoto. So I am in the Work Package 4, which is looking at this normative, how does it feed into understandings to the geopolitics? So I am an American foreign policy specialist, transatlantic relations foreign policy, and so my research is focusing on American transatlantic, and that’s what I’ll be presenting to you next. And my research was done. with Fylla Sinkkonen at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. WP5, this is the normative construction where we bring things on the economic and social level. Pauliina will also present today with that with James Shires. The paper that she’s done there, that’ll be also a paper that we have today. And then our last work package is communication and dissemination. They are also in charge of our website. I don’t have a link up there, which I should, of course. But it’s remitresearch.eu. So I definitely encourage you to look at our website, sign up for our newsletter. We’re really coming out now with the recommendation stage of our research. So please stay tuned. Maybe also sign up for our scenario testing workshop we will have. So this was also our conference, but I’ll go to the next page. So we will have a scenario testing workshop in January. Actually, we’ll have one first in September at FIIA, so in Helsinki is the next one. Then we’ll have one in January on cyber. Then we will have one in April in Rome. And we’ll also have our second conference. So we’ll have a big remit conference there. So you’re welcome to sign up for the conference. And then we’ll have another, two workshops at Löfven, one on internet governance and one on quantum, which will be in the fall. So definitely if you’d like to come to a workshop, if you have an interest in those particular technologies, please sign up. Please let us know. We would love to have you there. Also, if you are going to EISA, we have a whole section, a remit section, where we have nine panels. Some of our researchers will be in closed panels. And then we have opened it up to other panels. So the title of our section is Navigating the Geopolitics of Strategic Technology. And I greatly encourage you, if you’re going to be in Bologna in late August, come to one of our panels. And so that’s the end of that. So if you have any questions. I guess we’ll save that for the end, right? Okay. Then we can move on to my second presentation. So if I went through that fast, I didn’t have very much time. But obviously you can see that we’re doing a lot of research in remit. Okay. So as I promised, so my own area of research is transatlantic relations, looking at particular U.S. foreign policy. And I did this research, which is really looking at the different coalitions, using the Abbasid coalition, specifically within the Biden administration, looking at the three coalitions who are making policy, what their beliefs are, and of course that also spills over to American foreign policy today. And I did this with Phyllis Sinkhonen at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. So our research questions. So we really had a puzzle here. When Joe Biden assumed office, he promised to bring multilateralism back. But he didn’t do that. He really, especially if you’re talking about trade, he really adopted very much the Trump foreign policy. He also initiated a blunting strategy, curbing Chinese economic political power. And there are plenty of examples of that. You see that I have examples that are there on that slide. Controls, subsidies to develop U.S. strategic technology compatibility. And so what you come to realization that what Biden did was very much a significant shift from a Democratic president. You see that I have that in red, there’s a shift, especially when you’re thinking about someone as a person, his own ideologies before that, Biden really professed liberal internationalist worldview. And then I think together, these measures mark a momentous change in U.S. foreign policy and multilateralism as regards to China. So that’s what I’m really looking at. That’s my area of going forward. So what did I do? So I collected some data with my methodology. Well, I looked at newspapers. I used the LexisNexis database. I did some also semi-structured interviews with officials, and then I coded these. things. I had a team of coders. We coded through Atlas TI. We made a code book. All these things you can find in the article that I put together, which is already finished and submitted to the journal Geopolitics under a special issue. And then, of course, I used the ACF framework, which was really designed, and I’ve also done some research on this, and you can look at articles that I’ve written using the ACF to explain foreign policy change. And, of course, the last slide that I just showed you definitely highlights a foreign policy change in American foreign policy. So, I used ACF to explain this foreign policy change. So, this is the ACF in all the different steps, and my paper goes through all of these steps, and you can see that the first step is to identify the policy subsystems. So, I’m looking at U.S. foreign policy regarding multilateralism and China, specifically in their rivalry of strategic technologies. And I had a time frame, so the 1st of January 2021 to the 1st of January 2024, and that’s where I did my data collection. So, those are the documents that I coded were from that time frame. So, I’m identifying my first boundaries of this subsystem, and you can see that corresponds with a diagram there on the left end. And I actually identified, so it has coalition A and coalition B, but I identified three coalitions, which I will go through. The ACF is really focusing on beliefs. What do policy makers believe? What is their worldview? Then, based on this worldview, what do they want? How do they see the problem? What tools do they think are out there to address that problem? What are their policy preferences? All those things are part of the ACF as a framework. And so, what I did is I identified actors, the potential coalition members, through inductive and deductive coding, try to measure the coordination of the different coalitions, if they have good They’re a strong coalition, so I measured all these things about the actors. So this is part of the data now, so I told you I identified three coalitions. The first coalition I identified was the New Isolationists, and many of these people are members now of the Trump administration, although I think it’s very hard to characterize Trump as a New Isolationist, and I think that the current sort of turning on the mega crowd on each other is very much indicative of the fact that there are isolationists in the Trump administration, but also people that are more like Trump, maybe more transactionalist. So these are the people I identified that had these views, certainly you could talk about Peter Navarro or Stephen Miller, Chris Miller, all these people are very much isolationist views, which also is linked to the fighting that they have now within the Trump administration. So I identified those also through structural codes. These are trying to capture their world, their views, and also with value codings. My second coalition, these are the multilateralists. These are the people within America, with the foreign policy subsystem, who still really focus on multilateralism, who believe that’s the way to go forward, and I will show you also some of the views I have on later tables. Of course, this is a lot of data out there that I’m throwing at you, and I greatly encourage you to then look at the overall article, which then goes into this into much more detail. And then those that are primary coalition within the Biden administration, we label them flexilateralists, because they are somewhat multilateralist and somewhat New Isolationist. So I identified these three coalitions. Step three is to talk about identifying their different beliefs. And so here you see, these are all the beliefs, and in the advocacy coalition, as the previous slide showed, they divide beliefs up into deep core, near core, and secondary. Deep core are those things that are really at the heart of how you see the world, and then this will inform how you want to then guide your vision of the world, and then finally what policies do you want enacted based on your deep core and your near core beliefs. And then I tried to capture beliefs because, of course, capturing beliefs is a difficult thing to do. I captured that through value coding. So it captures worldview expressions of their worldview. And again, I used LexisNexis database for that. So this is the beliefs of the new isolationists. And the part that is blue, those are the things that the new isolationists believe, that they coincide with the flexilateralists. And the things in green, which there are no things in green in this case, are those things that overlap with the multilateralists. So these are the flexilateralists. And you can see, as I alluded to in the beginning, that flexilateralism has a lot in common with new isolationists, with blunting, with the Trump administration, that they adopted many of the same views as the Trump administration. So this is going to then, you’re going to see that Trump, in an economic way, in a rivalry way with China, very much was similar, the Biden administration was similar to the Trump administration. And you can see there’s a lot of red up there, that they coincide. So what did I do? Maybe it’s hard to see there, but on the left side, that’s the axis for coalitions. And on the right side is actually I looked at what were the main technologies that they talked about. And then you can see that robotics and cyber and biotechnology up there, but the really thing that everybody talked about was artificial intelligence, both military and civilians. You can see that was very much a part of it. And here, through descriptive coding, I tried to capture the dynamics between the different coalitions. Who’s winning the argument? Who’s being able to shape policy? And then you can see I tried to do that. And you can see also that the green, lateralists, which of course might be interesting for people today, they are in the minority. They were not very much heard. Their voices were drowned out by, well, obviously, flexilateralist voices. This is the code occurrence about beliefs. So then you can see who is informing beliefs and which beliefs. You see that the flexilateralists, their core beliefs, very much informing, again, AI, a little bit of biotechnology, a little bit of robotics. Yes, and I’m going fast because I realize I don’t have enough time. My chair is telling me I don’t have much time. But this gives you a sample of the findings that we had. This, I think, is also interesting. If you looked at the earlier vision on the ACF, external events are also very important when you’re talking about shifts or changes in policy. So I coded for 10 different external events. What is the most important external event shaping policy? And then what overwhelmingly came up is that from this timeframe, that the way that computing power is linked to great powers was the most important element of what everyone was talking about. What added the most impact on why the policy shifted in America from one of more multilateralists, sort of a liberal support of a liberal international order, to one of being concerned about multilateralism? Is the Cold War order really what is benefiting America? So you see that the computing power is very essential in this shift. And that’s the end of it. So I went fast. And I guess later we’ll have questions then. Okay, good. I’m sorry if it was too fast. I try to be fast.

Sophie Hoogenboom: It was perfect. It was before my timer actually went off. Thank you so much to Roberta for the first presentation. We have a small shift in the program in that we will be taking the paper that is listed third as second. So I now pass on the floor to Denis, Marielle and Nicola for the paper entitled Digital Constitutionalism and Global Digital Governance Identifying Actor-Principal Networks Between 321 Digital Build of Rights.

Paticipant: The floor is yours, also for 10 minutes. Thank you. Okay, great. Yes, thank you. So now we’re ready to go. It’s very odd with the headphones on, you hear yourself double. So I’m waiting for the slides to appear. Yes, thank you. So we’ll be talking about digital bills of rights, which is a topic that has been explored in the academic world for a little bit longer, but at the same time, not to the depths that we think it actually is interesting. So these digital bills of rights, they make normative claims about how the Internet and also more expansively other digital technologies ought to be governed and what rights people should enjoy. So in general, what it allows you to look at is what these documents tell us about the nature of global digital governance discourses. So this has been a joint project with quite some people involved, but led within the remnant project by Dennis Redeker and myself. We’ve been working together with Nicola Palladino at the University of Salerno within the context of the digital constitutionalism network and we can also include the efforts of quite some other people that are also included here on this slide. So since we have limited time, let’s dig right in. So these digital bills of rights, what are they? So they employ the characteristic jargon of constitutions. So documents made by states, classifying our core rights, for example, and articulating the rights of individuals and establishing obligations, similar to the way the constitutions do. They can be directed at different holders of powers, of course, initially mostly public, trying to restrain the power of states, but increasingly also private holders of power. And you can think of examples such as the African Declaration of Internet Rights and Freedoms. So in terms of research questions, what we’ve been trying to do is to study a very large set of these digital bills of rights covering over 30 years, which covers, of course, a lot of development in terms of thinking about governing the digital space. And we try to answer the questions, how is the normative? about digital rights structured, which actors form discourse coalitions, since of course this can go far beyond states as we know, which principles are affiliated then with these different coalitions that form around particular discourses. So we expanded a previously existing dataset, and it’s now expanded to 321 digital bills of rights, covering 1992 up to 2023. And if you’re interested in learning more, there’s also a lightning talk number 80 on Wednesday, where I’ll be talking about the dataset a bit more, and also the interactive interface that you can use to explore it. And these are all digital bills of rights that are related to the internet, to digital technologies, to platforms, to AI, governance and principles related to those different technologies. And they’ve all been hand-coded, so imagine a lot of people have been working very hard on this dataset, hand-coded for 58 principles and various categories of data or metadata, so things like freedom of expression, privacy and so on. So I won’t spend too much time on this, but there’s just an interesting thing already in what kind of documents actually are produced, and also how many of them. So over time you see that there’s increasing use of this format, so more and more digital bills of rights are being put out. But especially in the last few years, this is largely because of AI-related documents. So you see a peak, but most of that, the most recent ones, they really focus on AI. If we then look at what kind of actors are proposing them, because we are approaching this really as the whole breadth of who’s involved in multistakeholderism, then we do see that indeed all these different actor types, they are using this format. But if you look at the signatories, so who put them out, then of course a lot of it is supported by intergovernmental organizations, but also a lot of this comes from civil society, and to a lesser extent, for example, from academics, but also quite some involvement from the private sector. One thing we find interesting from the descriptive side is, of course, where do they originate from in terms of regions, so the geographical scope. And here we see that Europe is quite prominent, featuring within our data set as being the signatory proponent of these digital bills of rights, but also quite a lot from global, which is our UN, these kinds of global bodies, and also quite a lot from North America. But at the same time, of course, we also see regions that are much less represented within our data set. So a final thing before I hand over to my colleague is that because we coded for all of these principles, you can then see their development over time as well. So which principles are being used more often or less often? So, for example, you see the freedom of expression used to be one of the dominant ones, but now is featuring less within the newly put out bills of rights. So on that, I’ll hand over to my colleague.

Dennis Redeker: Thank you so much for the introduction to the data set and for those remarks, Marielle. So I’m going to take it to some of the analysis we did for this paper. We wondered, obviously, about the structure of how the discourse is linking actors and principles and rights they articulate. And in order to do that, we had to recode the data set a little bit, and we had to recode not just per document, so say the document entails this and that principle, but then we had to recode this statement. So these actors who authored the document are then taken as those supporting the statements, for example, in favor of multi-stakeholderism, in favor of freedom of expression, and so on and so on. So this is what we did. We did not collate those results because you can imagine some of the actors are authors of many of those digitables of rights, including the European Union, European Commission, European Parliament, Council of Europe, APC. So there are some actors who are very active in this debate and publishing these documents. Then we created a bi-apartheid network, essentially linking actors and principles, as I said, because we wanted to know about the structure of this entire larger discourse of 320 documents and all the statements and all the more than 800 actors that we coded. We used the FORCE-ATLAS algorithm in order to see how these clusters, so which actors and principles are closer to each other, which are more similar, and then we did not set the number of discourses or discourse coalitions that we wanted to see. So we had, in the end, came up with four clusters that are somewhat similar. I’m going to show you this now. This is what we got out of the 321 documents. I think there’s a word of caution and And Maria already explained that this is over a period of more than 30 years. So this is not necessarily people in one room. This is not that the IGF 2024 or something, where people just debate something specifically around one table. But instead, people might have authored a statement 20 years ago. And so they’re also entailed, maybe again, 20 years later, with a different kind of statement. And so what we haven’t done here is to look at the shifts, neither on the individual organizational actor level, nor on the level of the network for this. We’re working on this, but it’s quite complex. And this is essentially first kind of overall descriptive analysis. The four clusters that we found, you can see here, actually, that there are three bigger clusters and one smaller cluster. And you can see also, on gray, you see the principles, for example, on top, you see privacy, transparency, freedom of expression. And then you see the actors clustered around them by the stakeholder group. Sometimes it says multi-stakeholder, there we could not, from a group, so to say, so it’s a group that authored it, there’s no specific, yeah, well, that actor is just a multi-stakeholder actor, so to say. Well, this is the first cluster. We call it human rights and internet self-governance discourse coalition. The leading principles are transparency, freedom of expression, human rights, accountability, freedom of information. This is heavily dominated by civil society actors. If you look at all the purple here, this is also somewhat dominated by the stakeholders’ location in Europe, North America, and globally. And this is, in terms of the period, this starts already in kind of the earliest documents, and then we have a very strong uptake in the 2010s for this coalition. The second coalition is the inclusionary rights discourse coalition. Here we see right to access, user awareness, cultural diversities. These are often participation rights and principles, but also developmental interests to have the internet reach out to more people. Here we see a strong focus on one hand, I mean, on Africa, I think, in terms of regions, and that’s not surprising, but also civil society authors. The third cluster that we can make out is the security and legitimate purpose discourse coalition, we call it. This is all about privacy, data protection. These are the rights and values that are at the core of those actors, of those statements the actors are based on. And we see here a lot of government documents. fitting that bill, a lot of European and global documents, but not so much in Africa, not so much in North America. And the last and the smallest of these discourse coalitions is the Content Governance Discourse Coalition. This is really a discourse about social media, if you will. Content on the Internet is obviously a broader topic, and it can be understood as a more broader topic, but the freedom from hate speech, freedom from disinformation, intermediate reliability. These are buzzwords. These are principles closely linked to that discourse. So is digital literacy. And here we see a lot of European. We don’t see as many actors, but we do see a lot of civil society and intergovernmental organizations. We see a lot of European and global input. And that’s already pretty much it. We are seeing here a database that helps us better understand the overall picture of discourses in the space. It is certainly interesting to compare this to other ways of seeing discourse, either temporally in just one year or a period of three years, other kind of documents. We’ve earlier heard WSIS plus 20 contributions or input papers. These are other ways of understanding, obviously, discourse. What we see here is a strongly civil society-oriented perspective. And one open question I think that remains is how this squares with other ways of seeing the world, particularly this idea that we have this European, Chinese and American model, the digital empires as Andrew Bradford calls them. Also in the project we work on that assumption, essentially. How do we square this with those four discourse coalitions? And also, honestly, where is the Global South in that model of three digital empires? It is missing, but the Global South is part of the discourse, obviously. So this is quite important to differentiate. And that’s it for this paper. Thank you.

Trisha Meyer: Thank you, thank you, Marielle and Dennis, for this second presentation. We will be moving on to the third now of Apolline and James entitled Virtual Roots, Tomorrow Never Dies, How Emerging Technologies Shape Cybersecurity Futures. You also have 10 minutes and I will also be using my dog timer in case you go over.

Apolline Rolland: Thank you very much. Let me just take this off. All right. So hi, everyone. Thank you so much for having me today. My name is Apolline Roland. I’m a policy researcher in emerging technologies and cybersecurity at Virtual Roots. And maybe just to let you know, what is Virtual Roots? So it’s a non-profit that tackles the impact of emerging technologies on global affairs. a variety of activities, which you can see here, but more specifically, it would be into three branches, so research, education, public engagement with a variety of stakeholders. So the paper that I will be presenting today is called Tomorrow Never Dies, How Emerging Technologies Shape Cybersecurity Futures. And in particular, this presentation will explore how the concept of emerging technologies shape how we think about cybersecurity, and especially how institutions use it to project risk and action into the future. So this is also part of a broader conversation on how ideas like emergence and the concept of emerging technologies, obviously, travel through different institutions and influence governance. So first of all, some context. I will just, yeah. Emerging technologies are central to technological governance nowadays. However, what counts as emerging technologies and its meaning is very much taken for granted. So cybersecurity is actually shaped by that thinking, and it is inherently future-oriented. In cybersecurity, we act now on threats that are yet to occur. As such, the concept of emerging may sound a little bit descriptive, but it’s actually very political. It define what is seen as urgent, what requires priority, and thus determines governance and funding opportunities. So our research question for this paper was, how does emerging technology shape the cybersecurity imaginary, and especially its orientation to the future? Some definition first. So first of all, what do we mean by emerging technologies? So emerging technologies are defined by novelty. Yeah. Defined by novelty, uncertainty, and impact. They are politically constructed and future-oriented, and they occupy a threshold space. So they’re not yet real and there, but they are seen as urgent. Cybersecurity on the other. hand, it frames emerging technology as both a threat and a solution. So emerging technologies can be understood as threatening to cybersecurity, but then they can also provide solutions to cybersecurity solutions through emerging technologies. It follows quite a similar narrative as emerging technology in that it focuses on what is the next threat and what could be the next solution, and it depends on technological narratives to justify both anticipation and action. However, there is one key distinction to make here. Cybersecurity can be both a component of technology, but it can also be a technology area. So first, for our case selection, we decided to focus on the West, so emerging technologies as a Western problem. And I will just, yeah, sorry. So in this paper, we decided to focus on the West because the US and allies share quite similar institutional models for defining and governing emerging technologies, namely shared liberal market systems and aligned technological governance or technology governance. The West has framed emerging technology as both an economic opportunity and a strategic priority, which has led to aligned practices in technological assessment, for example, but also standardization and forecasting. China and Russia, in turn, just to give a little bit of a point of comparison, they have taken slightly different approaches to emerging technologies, and that is because that’s influenced by their own geopolitical context, but that is outside the scope of our paper. So in order to do this paper, we have mapped out technological or technology organization assessments since 1972 in the West. Without going too much into details, these institutions have basically helped frame what we understand as emerging technology in the West and assess and both diffuse as well the notion of what constitutes as emerging technology and how risk is managed to. You can see from here, less and less are being developed. That’s because obviously they already exist. However, maybe one point here, we have noticed that the ones that were more, we’ll say, recent, are either seen more as advisory, so they’ve been developed as part of, for example, parliamentary duties, or they’re very sector specific. So for example, the health sector have developed specific technology assessment organization. So how do we evaluate cybersecurity as emerging technology? So as we’ve seen before, cybersecurity is both shaped by and evaluated as emerging technology. So we can see them both as an aspect and a component of emerging technology, but also as a field of emerging technology. And existing tools for assessment actually don’t quite fit the nature of cybersecurity, because cybersecurity is a very particular kind of technology, it can be both hardware and software, it’s both digital and also physical. And there is a need for a better model. But let’s see perhaps two examples that we have researched to kind of back up this claim. The first one that we looked at was the Gartner Hype Cycle. So for a little bit of context, Gartner Hype Cycle is a methodology developed by Gartner, which is a private consultancy. It is widely used to help clients decide when to invest. And it relies heavily on experts judgment and market sentiment. It’s very much subject to market hypes. And it is not really backed by scientific criteria. It’s very subjective. And in the case of cybersecurity, for example, that could mean focusing on what looks exciting rather than what is actually important. The second methodology that we looked at was technology readiness levels. So it’s maybe more of an accurate slash developed technology. It was developed by NASA. for the airspace and defense field originally to track technical maturity from early research to operational deployments, but it remains also a little bit subjective, especially in the testing phases. And it also does not account for the issue of technological obsolescence. So for example, once a technology is released into the market, it will be deemed as being emerging, but then over time it will remain with a high TRL level while not really being emerging anymore, let’s say. And with regards to cyber security specifically, there has been many attempts to apply TRLs to cyber security, but they’ve been rather inconsistent we found. So first they’ve been applied to cyber security system viewing cyber security as a field. Then they have applied cyber security as a score to technological innovation. So cyber security here is more seen as like a component or an aspect to assess a given technology. And sometimes it’s been seen as, it’s been developed as cyber specific TRL models, but they don’t quite capture the unique nature of cyber security and the specific evaluation needs that require more flexibility because cyber security is non-linear. It’s quite dynamic and it’s also relational. So what does the concept of emerging technologies do for cyber security? Two main thing. First, it justifies funding through speculative models with limited scientific grounding. And second, it prioritizes cutting edge technology while overlooking older critical dependencies. So at the expense, for instance, of mundane but critical systems, such as legacy codes, outdated infrastructure, but also underfunded public services. And so to conclude on this, I will just conclude on that note. The question should probably not be only on what technologies are emerging, but who decides what gets seen and what gets missed. And that goes through evaluation. And this matters, especially because it influences how emerging technologies, including cybersecurity, no matter how you see it, is governed. across institutions, and that will be all for me.

Trisha Meyer: Thank you very much. Well-kept within time. I will now be passing the floor for 10 minutes to our discussant, Dr. Olga Kyryliuk, who served on MEG and is also the current chair of the Southeastern European Dialogue on Internet Governance seating. The floor is yours.

Olga Kyryliuk: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. I’m a little bit outside for this party, but still it’s such a huge pleasure to engage with such a rich body of the research and the governance of digital technology. And listening to the presentations, I have found myself thinking about how far the conversation around the digital technology governance has gone until now, and how complex also it has become along this way. I also want to note that what we’ve had from our speakers are not just academic explorations, but attempts to make sense of the reality that for many of us who are working in the policy field is the everyday terrain that we are trying to navigate. And this is the space where both geopolitics, governance ideals, and normative aspirations all collide. A decade ago, when I was writing my PhD on multi-stakeholder policymaking, I was thinking that this is the approach which is offering a fresh and promising force for the re-energizing of international law. And it seemed to offer a more inclusive, flexible alternative to state-centric decision-making, something which is more agile and more human-centered. That was the kind of approach that could bridge global divides and bring in voices which too often were left out of the formal diplomacy, which also has been shown today by the speakers. But with the time, we have come to see a lot of cracks also in the multi-stakeholder approach and the promise of multi-stakeholderism, which. was promoted as something which is totally open, participatory, and bottom-up has often faltered in implementation efforts. We witnessed glaring disparities in stakeholder representation, which was rightfully pointed just a couple of minutes ago by Dennis in what they have found also in their research. We have seen that civil society groups struggle to sustain engagement in many internet governance forums, especially representatives who are coming from the global south, again, which was mentioned in the research paper. Discussions are held quite a lot, but policy doesn’t always follow those discussions. And while the internet governance forum after 20 years remains a vital space for dialogue, how many times have we left the venue with rich ideas? That was many, many times. I can think of that, but it was very rare that we had a very clear path for the implementation of those ideas. And this is an important thing that after having all these discussions, it’s also important not just to wait until the next IGF is happening in a year-long time, but also that there are discussions and follow-up activities happening in between. So, what struck me in today’s presentations is also how the current research papers lays about this tension and whether it’s the construction of rights discourses through digital bills, the shaping of cybersecurity futures by narratives around emerging technologies, or the domestic coalitional dynamics that influence what kind of multilateralism is even possible. All of it reminds us that the internet governance has never been just about technical coordination or cooperative norm-building. It has always been also about the power that stakeholders bring to the table. And we also should be honest, any policy-making process in this space today is inseparable from geopolitical competition. Strategic technologies such as AI, quantum cloud, semi-conductor… are now the terrain of economic warfare and national security. And who sets the standards? Who controls the infrastructure? Who defines the risks? These are no longer the neutral questions as was vividly shown by Roberta on the example of continuous US-China tensions. And the notion of a shared digital future often collapses under the weight of national interests. Yet, even in this fragmented reality, I see a lot of value in what the researchers have attempted to do and shared with us in their today’s presentations. By mapping coalitions and tracing narratives, but also by revealing the deeper tensions in how digital governance is discussed and understood, the researchers offer something that we as practitioners desperately need, and this is a clear sense of the forces shaping the playing field. This kind of analysis can inform how we approach inclusive participatory governance, not just as an abstract ideal, but also as a strategy which is rooted in realism and not just in some far-going aspirations which are never going to be implemented. It helps us ask sharper questions. For example, who is shaping the emerging norms and whose values are reflected in those norms? How can multi-stakeholder spaces like IGF remain relevant, not just as forums for talk, but also as platforms that fit meaningfully into norm development and institutional decision-making? And lastly, can we create connective tissue between digital rights bills and regulatory frameworks and also between anticipatory narratives and inclusive governance models? We might, for example, look at how the notion of digital constitutionalism could be mainstreamed into IGF outputs, translating values into principles and principles into pressure on policymakers. Or we might also consider how IGF-hosted coalitions could proactively engage in shaping how emerging technologies are framed, not just by dominant Western actors, but in a way that centers equity, legacy infrastructure challenges, and the lived realities of users across the globe. We can take AI as a real-life example, which was also mentioned today. a couple of times, today powerful actors talk about frontier AI as if it was the only game in the town. Yet for most of the world, the issue is not simply GPT-4, GPT-5, but algorithmic discrimination in public welfare systems or exploitative surveillance in migration contexts. We need governance frameworks that speak to both realities. So yes, multi-stakeholderism is still worth defending, but not uncritically. We need to strengthen it with the safeguards for meaningful participation, mechanisms for accountability, and pathways to translate talk into policy. And this is where the IGF is still holding potential, if it embraces a bolder role in convening, documenting, and advocating for concrete follow-ups and implementation of those insights and recommendations that are being so widely discussed during the sessions like the one we are having today. So to summarize, I would say that the road ahead for global technology governance definitely won’t be linear, and it won’t be apolitical. But if we use analysis like the one that was presented today, not only to understand the terrain, but also to design smarter, more inclusive engagement strategies, then perhaps we can still push the internet governance field toward equity, even in a world which is shaped by a lot of competing interests, values, and governance strategies. And most importantly, the ideas which have been discussed today shouldn’t remain just in academic journals or within the walls of the panel discussion rooms. Let’s do our best to find ways to carry them into our strategies, our partnerships, and our institutional reforms. Thank you.

Trisha Meyer: Thank you very much for this rich intervention. I’ve been impressed at the speed at which each of you is able to have the words flowing and coming out coherently. We will be moving on to a little bit less than 20 minutes of Q&A. As I indicated at the beginning of this panel, I’ll be taking online participants’ questions and comments first. However, I do not see any at this point, but feel free to raise your virtual hand or put them in the chat and I can read them out. I will then move on to questions here within the room at this point. Yes, go ahead.

Ignacio Castro: Thank you for the very interesting presentations. My name is Ignacio Castro from Queen Mary University of London. So I think this question goes more to the first two presentations. I was wondering whether you have considered using tooling from natural language processing that could help you analyze in a different manner. So not as a replacement, but complementing what you have done. And I was also wondering whether you have considered comparing the data you analyze with a different one and somehow normalizing things. So for example, when I don’t remember which presentation it was, says like most of the people is talking about AI. Well, everybody’s talking about AI pretty much everywhere you go. So it could be kind of interesting to find a way to somehow normalize that or to compare it with a different institution to see if that’s an outlier or it just happens to follow the regular trend. So I could be very curious to see further work on that. Thank you very much.

Audience: Thank you. We’ll take a second intervention. I’m Christopher Yu from the University of Pennsylvania. So thank you very much for the presentations and particularly the ones that I love the empirical grounding because so many of these things or the presentations of this note are often just observational and it’s hard to make the claims. I keep thinking of what I always think of as Hume’s guillotine, which is you start with a descriptive analysis. And the question is, what do we make from it? Because the problem to me has historically been with institutional analyses, particularly political economy analysis. or positive political theory, or what you will, we know that certain multi-stakeholder things, we can describe them, but there’s very little traction on how we should design such processes in ways that overcome problems. And so, I find myself wanting some comparative analysis, you know, you mentioned in the last panel ICANN, they formalized the GAC, you know, the Governmental Affairs Committee, is this positive or negative? We talk about the institutionalization of the user representation in ways to make it more concrete, because talking about multi-stakeholderism and this pluralism of values says little about different institutional forms that would make them better or worse implemented. And I find myself craving some more analysis of different styles of multi-stakeholderism to make some more prescriptive claims of what a better and worse multi-stakeholder design would look like, because as we moved with a broad commitment towards multi-stakeholderism in a lot of sectors, we also have the work done by various people who’ve analyzed that there are many flavors of multi-stakeholderism and the hardest choice will be choosing among them. And so, I found myself craving, wondering if the work you were doing is moving in directions that might shed some analysis, some insight into that. Thank you.

Trisha Meyer: I think we’ll take about two minutes of any each speaker who would like to intervene at this point.

Roberta Haar: I might say a few words to start out with. Thank you very much for our discussions and very nice bringing everything together. And I definitely think that, and thank you for also noticing that we’re really trying to be empirical. So, we are trying to gather the data. We’re trying to map the world as it is and, indeed, to gain insights of how we go forward. We are, as I said, we’re in the second year of our consortium and so we’re at the data gathering. stage of our consortium. And the next part is to do the comparative part that you mentioned. So we have people who are experts on the EU and the consortium. And we have experts, people who are experts on China. And we’re using a little bit different empirical methods. So my PhD student, for example, he’s coded 900 different documents. He’s doing more of a network analysis in China. What are the different groups there in China? What do they believe? What are they going forward? So indeed, the next thing we want to do is then compare these things and see if we can find some pathways, some overlap, things that we can suggest. Because the last part of our consortium, the last stage, the last deliverable that we promised the Commission are recommendations. What do we do in the future? So now, you’re sort of halfway through. So stay tuned to remit. Go to our website. Also on the EU Commission website, there’s our deliverables that we have made so far in our journey of, in the end, finding recommendations. And that’s what we hope to do. And we also hope that we could harvest some information from the scenario testing workshops that we’ve done. So the data that we have, we’re putting into these scenarios about what will happen in the future. And then we can gather some harvesting from the players, recommendations that we can. What have they observed about playing the game that we’ve created? So stay tuned, I would say, for some more of that. And we are really trying to ground what we want to suggest in the future through some empirics, through the hard data in the various ways that we’re going forward. So I’ll give it to Dennis.

Dennis Redeker: Thank you. Thank you all for the fantastic comments and also the questions slash comments. I think it also ties somewhat in, I think Olga made the point of how digital constitution and these documents feed into the IGF process. And Christopher Nguyen proposed, okay, can we learn something for institutional design from this, right? And these fit well together. We don’t, I mean, with this data, I think the values and the rights, the principles that were coded, they’re more like outcomes. The question is what kind of institutions fit these outcomes? How can we achieve them? Some of the codes that we have are actually. Stakeholders and transparency, these are kind of a different kind, but many of them are substantive in that sense. So it really depend on, what really create outcomes for internet users. So that’s an interesting question. I think something that we need to, as part of the project also, do. And the other question, I think the two questions actually, Ignacio and Castro. So LLM use, we’re now starting a project actually, because these are the data- Sorry, NLP, not LLM. Sorry? NLP, natural language processing, not just large language models. NLP more generally, yes, exactly. So different ways of analyzing this. We do have a few master’s students actually work on different things with the database, but we’re also trying to expand the database. And so this relates maybe to also the second point, trying to be more efficient in the sense of scaling the coding, because it’s quite labor intensive. And we’re starting a project looking into how we can code current and future documents in more efficient ways as they come out. But it also might then relate to opportunities to actually take different data sources and to play them in and to compare this, to say, with this input, GDC input, and these kinds of documents, just to see cross-references and see, you said normalization. I mean, in a way, we’ll have to see how we do that. That’s not so easy. But yeah, in a sense, I think the comparison to other kinds of data would be key. To very quickly comment back on that, we have analyzed the ITF and W3C using computational methods. So we’d be very happy to talk further about this because some of the challenges that you will face are probably quite similar and volumes of data are probably similar as well. Absolutely, let’s do that. Thank you.

Trisha Meyer: All right, we have another question. Please go ahead.

Jonathan Liebenau: Much of the evidence that you’re using relates to preferences and positions. rather than actions and outcomes. And I’m concerned that, at least in some future step of the research, there’s a more clear relationship that’s established. I think it’s a very serious problem. I remember in the late 1980s, I became very interested in those countries that were beginning to have IT policies built into their serious policy frameworks, and I related that to investment and import rulings and various kinds of things. But it very soon became the case that all countries had IT policies. They very much looked the same. They did change, but they changed together, and they were completely decoupled from the outcomes that I was initially interested in. And I’m concerned that this is a pattern that you may find, first, if you take a longer period looking over the formation of these preferences and positions, and do more to relate that to what kind of outcomes we might expect.

Sophie Hoogenboom: I have a question online, Satish. Are you able to unmute, or would you like me to read out your question? I will go ahead and read that. Then, thanks for a very engaging session. I’m Satish Babu, board member of DotAsia organization and member of ALEC ICANN. I’d like to ask what the learnings from this discussion are for the global South, if any, going beyond multi-stakeholderism. Thank you in advance. I’ll invite a response from our speakers. First of all, how do we go from policies and principles to practices, or how do we at least capture those practices? and then the online question on the findings for the Global South, if any, going beyond multistakeholderism.

Dennis Redeker: Thank you for those questions. Again, I mean, we haven’t figured it out. I think Jonathan Lim now asked about the move to practice, maybe reform of institutions, and how do we actually keep those principles outlined in these documents, particularly those documents in the dataset we have on state parties and international organizations. They do have the power to some extent. I mean, they’re always confined in that to realize principles in practice. I think that’s something that we’re working on, and it would be great to also get your advice and input on the ways we can structure recommendations and we can also look into tracking actions versus principles. So, I mean, that’s the one thing we can do even before the stage of recommendations, and then we can recommend how to bridge the gap. And we have a quick answer to the question online. Great question indeed. I mean, in the part that we’re analyzing, we do see, as I mentioned, we do see this heavily, one of the coalitions heavily dominated by the Global South actors, which are part of that, and that relates to Internet access, relates to participation in the global digital sphere. And I think these are the kind of questions or concerns that are very much lacking in some of the frameworks we have, whether it’s the digital empire, certainly the digital empire’s literature, when focusing only on those great powers. So I think there’s something that we as disciplines also should do to turn this around, not just use only what we see in the data, but really start with a theoretical framework that entails, I think, the Global South as well.

Olga Kyryliuk: So I also want to comment on this moving from principles to actions, and I believe that’s the whole problem about multistakeholderism, because you can have the best multistakeholder model and then all stakeholders present around the table, but the thing is that this model lacks the enforcement power, and then when it comes to the actual enforcement and implementation, this is very often about the government’s will to implement what has been discussed. around the table, the governments can commit to things, but if those principles and ideas and recommendations are not further taken into implementation, then there is not so much value into having all those stakeholders around the table. And I believe we should be really considering after so many years praising the multi-stakeholder model that we also should look for the ways how to actually be more convincing towards decision makers who have the power to put those principles into action. And also it’s very important to support the research which has been done by the academics to move it further into action because there is such a huge bulk of research papers and different analysis being produced by academic institutions, by civil society organizations and so much money invested into that and you can find almost every single research paper with the list of recommendations concluding, but then again where are these recommendations ending up if they are not further taken to decision makers, then it’s not that much value.

Roberta Haar: I’m looking around the room, you would like, yes please go ahead. I’d like to jump in on this also that we’re not maybe doing enough about linking actions, our ideas, our positions to actions and outcomes and if I could bring up my slides again, I would show you that the ACF is trying to also do that. I don’t know if you’re referring to my paper, but we are definitely trying to say what are the power dynamics between the coalitions, what are the actions that they are taking, whether those meet what they profess to their beliefs in the first place or not. So we’re really at the moment trying to map reality, not only what they say but what they do and then through that go to the next step and have some recommendations of how to go forward. So we’re trying to capture that, maybe we’re not always successful, but definitely we’re trying to do that.

Trisha Meyer: All right with this I would like to close this session to give everyone four minutes to grab a coffee, but I will thank all of our panellists for presenting these various research in progress of the Remit project. You can find remitresearch.eu and as a reminder there will be a lightning talk 80 Wednesday at 2 p.m. discussing more findings and the data set specifically underlying some of these papers. Thank you everyone for joining both online and here in the room. We will be back at 11 30. Let’s give ourselves until 11 32 then you have a five-minute break. Thank you.

Sophie Hoogenboom: Let me see let me see Uh, all right everyone, uh, welcome back to our next session and this session is the giganet frontier Papers, and this was an initiative that we’ve created for this symposium for the edition Uh of 2025 and this was of course because our last session Was held in december In saudi so we didn’t have enough time to do a proper paper call and a review process But instead we have asked two of our colleagues that have been active in the giganet community before to To give a presentation So without further ado, I would like to give the floor to Chelsea Horne for the first presentation of this session

Chelsea Horne: Um Good morning, everyone. Uh, thank you so much to giganet for having me here and thank you in particular to sophie and to jamal Uh, so my presentation, uh, well first my name is chelsea horn. I am a senior lecturer at american university in washington dc My presentation is titled going growing up governed parental controls child online safety and the politics of internet regulation Now this project it ties together three key themes one is these questions of platform design which is something that’s coming up very often now, especially in policy and regulation concerns. It’s tying together concerns about online safety and in particular that of youth and children. And I hope that this project raises questions but also opportunities for policy interventions to either think about the ways that we regulate online safety in regards to children in particular and also what are some of the opportunities to rethink the ways that we regulate design. I see we’re one behind on the slides here. Got it. Now this is part of a larger project where I’m working on a book project on privacy settings. So to set the stage here at large, I want to give some general context. First is that privacy settings, I argue, are a critical space for research, policy, literacy, and enforcement. Some people say that privacy settings are a hollow game or something that doesn’t matter. One of my central thesis is that they do matter and that is a critical opportunity point. The general conversation right now is that we have this situation that places a lot of burden and I would say undue burden on the user. Default choices often neither reflect privacy-friendly practices and not user preferences. There’s a lot of research that supports this. Yet our online conversations about privacy are framed as a matter of individual responsibility and privacy literacy. So we have this at-odds conversation that we’re at right now. So privacy settings, privacy and settings together. So we’re looking at the intersection of user, platform, and regulation. We have a lot of research that indicates that users do not change their privacy settings or if they do, it is only when they are aware of a privacy violation. Platforms, my research shows, they rely a lot on questions of control and choice via their privacy settings. And we also see how regulators define and penalize, and also we look at things like the GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, and a lot of other new proposed policies. They’re looking at how we can penalize deceptive settings, also known as dark patterns, which is a new phrase to refer to manipulative and deceptive design practices. Social media platforms, as we know, especially in this context, they are a critical mode of communication. The average user has approximately 8.5 social media accounts, which is very important to think about in the context of my research because we’re not looking at just one platform. There’s a disarray of consistency across platforms in terms of privacy settings and default selections. So that raises a lot of concerns about the privacy in concept, in practice. Facebook itself has over 3 billion monthly active users, which is over half of the internet users today. Platforms play a significant role in setting policies on privacy, security, speech, data, and more. Oh, thank you. It’s okay, I have my slides here. Perfect, here we go. So, parental controls. There are growing concerns about mental health and that of children in particular. So we see this emergent trend of parental controls online. They are a particular type of setting that allows parents to select, mediate, and establish rules for their child’s account. Now, this is an issue I’m focusing primarily on the United States, but it is an issue that’s being raised at a global scale across the European Union, China, India, Brazil, and the United States. Now, parental controls, they’re at this core issue of online safety, digital trust and resilience, responsible innovation, and digital rights, making it a critical issue and concern of the frontier of internet governance today. Thank you. So in terms of policy, I looked at this in terms of the United States here. extending interest in including guidance on parental controls from the start of the 1997-1996 era where the United States really started to focus on regulating Internet issues. We also have several ongoing lawsuits today that allege faulty design of online platforms existing privacy and parental controls, arguing in particular that ineffective or nonexistent controls contribute to the online harm of children. So parental controls is one of these key tenets of several of these ongoing lawsuits. Now what you see here in this chart, there’s two main things I want you to get from this. First, what I’ve done here is looking at U.S. proposed legislation, I tracked the key term of parental controls over time, looking at specifically issues that related to online issues. So like there was one, for example, on parental controls in health concerns, but since it didn’t have to do with online, I cleaned it out of the data set. So we see two things here. We see from 2002 to 2008, but in particular from 2006 to 2008, a peak in legislation that addresses parental controls. Now this is around the same time, as many of you know, that Facebook and similar platforms were taking center stage in social media. So we see a peak in platforms, and we see a peak in legislation that’s trying to target parental controls of platforms. And then we see a second rise from 2019 to 2023, so until today, basically, in terms of the data set that was available, we see another peak. And so post-Cambridge Analytica, post-2018, and a lot of the new legislation, such as the GDPR, being fully enforced, we see another peak of parental controls. So these are tied directly towards inflection points around privacy concerns on social media platforms. So the second point is, when we look at what are the key policy areas being addressed, We see that is for science, technology, and communication are the primary ones during the first peak, but during the second peak, the main concern actually is on crime and law enforcement. So we see two different concerns about parental controls. One is online safety in the beginning, 2006 era, and now the more recent ones, they’re more concerned about online safety in regards to crime and law enforcement. Looking at the phrase frequency of the major concerns of each of these bills, the number one phrase—like, each bill has, like, different subject areas that are tied to them. And so the top one was pornography. And this was the number one concern of most of the proposed bills that had to do with parental controls. Then we see other concerns like civil actions, liability, administrative remedies, right to privacy is within the top five. But then we see all the—between the top ten are crime prevention, crimes against children, criminal investigation, criminal justice information. So there’s a very heavy focus on crime and law enforcement in these bills. Now of the ones within the data set, three became actual law, and what I have here is an excerpt in the quota section of the one from 2002, which refers to parental controls. So, quote, although the computer software and hardware industries and often related industries have developed innovative ways to help parents, to date such efforts have not provided a national solution to the problem of minors accessing harmful material on the World Wide Web, end quote. So from very early on, there was always a concern of saying that platforms say that their parental controls, their privacy settings, are innovative and top of the line, but there are concerns about how effective they actually can be. So moving on into the actual analysis here, when I’m looking at online safety for children, there’s two key components I noted. One are what are the default solutions. elections, because many platforms, they change their default settings for youth, teen, and children’s accounts. And the second thing are the actual parental controls themselves. So we see I’ve separated into two different sections here. So what we’re looking at in this slide are for the several of the top social media platforms, what are some of the concerns that they have switched higher default settings for youth accounts? And this has to do with location, tagging, the account visibility, messaging, and also in terms of content. These are the ones that seem to be most universal across the different platforms. And in a full paper, I will expand more on what each of these mean. But what we’re seeing here is that there’s still a lack of consistency. Some platforms like YouTube are not worrying about these at all. Some of like Facebook, Instagram have some of the highest default settings and are most publicly have the strongest public rhetoric around this too. In addition to the more standardized ones, the TikTok had several additional extra defaults that weren’t really consistent across other platforms because they had different functionalities. So here this is just showing that TikTok had the most nuance to their default teen settings. Now moving on to the parental controls part of it, we see here that Facebook and Instagram also have the highest quantity of privacy settings, parental controls in terms of privacy settings, but also we’re looking at what are the themes that are being raised in these actual parental controls. So how much time is being spent, does it allow parents to set breaks or prompt reminders of saying like, hey, you’re on our platform for a long time? Do the settings allow parents to manage the actual friends of their children? Are they able to view or approve the teen settings? Do they allow the teens to regulate their own settings, but then a parent still has to go and double check and approve. those settings in order for them to be applied, looking at filter, blocked, blocking of content and or of people, messaging, and the actual content of what text can be offered through. In terms of extra parental controls, TikTok again, because their platform has so many different nuanced components, had the most amount of parental controls in totality. Here we see a typology of privacy settings I developed a couple of years ago, where I looked at privacy settings in general. There’s seven types to this typology, looking at visibility, discoverability, bounderability, content, account security, data access and portability, as well as data sharing and personalization. So looking at different platforms, we can isolate each privacy setting into one of these categories. Now looking at it through the lens of parental controls, we see here two main points from this. One is that TikTok has the most amount of parental controls, whereas YouTube has the lowest. But we see that questions of bounderability are the most visible across all of these parental controls. So we see that being the primary concern for all platforms is the ability to limit access to teens or children’s accounts. And then we see a range of otherwise outside of that, so there’s a lack of consistency. So in terms of key findings, there’s a wide array of the actual quantity of parental controls being allowed. So the nuance of what can and will be enforced by these parental controls. We also see that platforms take on the burden of the visibility part. So how accessible is a teen’s account to the general public? So platforms take on the burden of that responsibility, and they don’t give that to the parents to control. Whereas when I do the study for this for adults, visibility was the number one privacy setting typology that’s put across. So it’s very interesting to see that what’s concerned for adults. platforms take on that responsibility themselves. There’s a unified focus towards setting limits of the children’s accounts in terms of boundarability. Only Discord and TikTok have content concerns and I’ve actually added a new addition to my typology which is the question of transparency. So these are parental control settings that allow parents to see a child’s settings as opposed to actually having control over them. So to wrap up here in terms of what are some of the discussion points that are raised by this type of analysis. We see that parental controls like privacy are a concept in disarray. We see that the parental controls also shift the burden or one could argue the opportunity of responsibility to parents. And we also have questions of what types and amount of control parents should have which that is something that from a global perspective will be very interesting to pursue in terms of research. And then the final two questions are how will parental control shape how we choose platforms? So say something like TikTok which has very comparatively strict parental control options in the most wide range versus something like YouTube which has very few parental control options. So how does that shape how parents choose their platforms for their children? It also raises a larger question of what is the role of parental controls? So one cynic view is to say that it’s a form of posturing by the platforms to say we are offering choice and control to parents and it’s a pushing off of the burden responsibility of online safety for children. But also we could say that parental controls are perhaps a solution which is another perspective on it. So it raises this question of what is the role of parental controls? So I will finish up there. So thank you very much. The QR code is to my LinkedIn so if you’re interested in this topic I would love to continue the conversation and go from there. So I’ll pass it back to Sophie. Thank you very much.

Sophie Hoogenboom: Thank you Chelsea. I think you presented a very interesting insight. I would like to go to the second presentations of this panel. is from Vagisha Srivastava, I’m so sorry, please repeat it, thank you.

Vagisha Srivastava: Hi everyone, thank you Sophie for the opportunity, you’re right it’s Vagisha Srivastava, very on point. So I will be talking about a specific case of CBDC innovation and I’m looking at India in particular, I’m talking about the paradoxes that have come up around inclusion, around surveillance and competition in the digital payment landscape in general. Okay, but before I begin with anything, let me just ask you all with a show of hand, how many of you have heard about a CBDC before? Okay, one, two, okay great, so for everybody else you have something new to learn. The ABCs of CBDC, CBDC is essentially a central bank digital currency which is a digital legal tender issued by the central bank of a specific country and in most cases that we have seen, they have a direct sovereign liability. We are seeing it being developed in two flavors, which is a retail flavor which is for domestic payments and at a wholesale flavor which is for bank to banks or cross-border transactions. It’s often said that it has a cash-like finality but it depends on the design of the CBDCs that the central banks choose, whether it’s programmable or it’s offline or it’s you know instant, all of those choices depend on the design. Now so far as we talk, according to the Atlantic Council’s database, 130 countries are exploring in the pilot stage, have launched it or are researching on a CBDC development. The green ones that you see on screen are the ones that have already started a pilot. The motivations are multi-factored, some say it’s for financial inclusion, there’s a strict idea that you know we want to built resilience against failing infrastructures domestically in terms of digital payments, but also globally with financial infrastructures being controlled by major dominant countries like US. So any sanctions of SWIFT, et cetera, is what has become a key cursor or a motivation point for countries to explore. There’s also the idea of a fight against crypto, saying that a central bank digital alternative can always compete with a cryptocurrency. But I can see on a lot of faces, you’re wondering why am I talking about this here? So I have an answer for you. So why am I talking about payments at GigaNet? Now, the three key understandings for me is that digitalization of money or digitizing money replicates a lot of digital governance dilemmas and challenges that we have seen in the internet governance space before. So there are questions around access gaps, inclusion problems, there are questions around platform powers, there’s surveillance risk that comes from a central bank issuing a digital lending alternative. There’s also aspects of sovereignty, and I have classified that into two. So there’s a monetary sovereignty aspect, which is competing directly with crypto. States want more control over the issuance and the finality of transactions. And there’s also a digital sovereignty angle, which is states do want to have some control over the compute and the infrastructure through which money moves on the internet. There’s also an angle of weaponized interdependence. This is a developing theory by Farrell and Newman, which I’ve tried to pick up here, which is countries don’t want to rely on global financial networks such as SWIFT, because we’ve seen that they are prone to some sort of coercion in some cases. So if you look at the alternatives that are being discussed at the G20, at BRICS, which are trying. to de-align themselves from the U.S. financial network, we see CBDCs coming up as an alternative. So it kind of fits into a lot of narratives that we have heard being talked about in the internet governance space, but it just translates onto money. So digital money, as I see it, is information which has some sort of economic value embedded to it and has a trust associated with it, which is moving across the internet-linked infrastructure. So that is kind of why I started looking at the digital currencies, and that’s why I got the opportunity to speak here about this. Now, this is kind of the broader picture. I would now like to zoom in on one specific case study, which is India, and there are two key reasons why I, there are two key reasons why I chose India as a case study. One, because it’s in a late pilot stage of development, and two, it’s, I’m a little bit more aware of the context because I’m from there, and we are seeing a lot of puzzling things coming up in the digital payment infrastructures that I thought deemed an exploration. So I will now present a timeline of the digital payment milestone in India. This is linked to CBDCs, but it’s like the whole development landscape of what has happened in the past few years in the digital payment space. So we began with Aadhaar infrastructure, which is a digital ID project that India started. It’s also highly linked to the whole DPI dialogue that’s been happening in the space for a long time now. And ID was necessary because when you link it with payment, you have all the options of KYCs and EMLs and whatnot. So we started with the Aadhaar infrastructure development, which then developed into an ID-linked payment system, which is your Aadhaar. that enabled payment system. In 2016, there was a UPI launched, which is a Unified Payment Interface that the central bank and the government launched to sort of provide for a digital payment alternative that wasn’t existent in India. It’s quite a sophisticated technology. It has its flaws and it has its shortfalls, but in terms of the infrastructure itself, it’s really sophisticated. This was further sort of linked to a demonetization attempt, which was a government’s attempt to sort of enable more cashless economy to flourish in the country. That’s at least the conjunction that’s normally drawn in the country. Finally, if you go to 2020, which was when the COVID struck, we saw sort of digital payments getting accelerated because people did not prefer using cash, and that is what the RBI, or the Reserve Bank of India, which is the central bank authority, banged on to start thinking about the CBDC, which was globally a dialogue that was being conducted. So in 2022, we saw, from 2020 to 2022, there were some internal talks happening. In 2022, we saw the development or a pilot launch of a CBDC, today, as we speak, there’s one pilot of offline DBT, which is direct benefit transfer that CBDC has been used for, but the tool or the innovation is still struggling for viable use cases, so the government is still struggling to figure out a use case. So with that broad timeline context in mind, I can now begin talking about the research question. There were a lot of puzzles initially, because why would a government… even start competing with its own, you know, resources that it has, you know, developed with previously. So, like I said, you know, a unified payment interface was working quite well. It’s a digital payment alternative. People were using it, you know, in place of cash. So why launch a CBDC? What’s the motivation behind it? Why are you competing with, you know, a product that you yourself have launched? So that’s the puzzle that I started with. And this led me into questioning to what extent is India’s CBDC initiative a strategic response to infrastructural, monetary, and geopolitical risk, rather than, you know, a tool for financial inclusion. Now, I must point out that in the concept note that the central bank, you know, issued before, they mentioned three key areas that they were wanting to target. One was that they want to promote a cashless economy, and they want more people to not use cash and shift to digital payment rails. The second one was that they want to have financial inclusion in the country. And the third one was that CBDC will, you know, act as a barrier to crypto usage in the country. So those were the three key sort of objectives that they had listed. And inclusion, of course, became like a big deal, the most used terms in a lot of reports that you’d see. The way I’m using inclusion here is slightly different in the sense that, of course, I’m talking about bringing the marginalized population on board, but I’m also including the population that has, you know, on their own chosen to exclude themselves from a digital payment alternative. So it’s a conversation around inclusion, but it’s also a conversation around people who chose to, you know, get offline and not use the digital payment alternative. So, and of course, the central bank and the government would want to bring both of them on board if they want to promote a cashless economy. The way I’m defining strategy. utility over here is the value attributed to the digital rupee in three main domains, which is safeguarding monetary sovereignty, which is people using domestic payment alternatives rather than the foreign alternatives, and this is highly reliant on the adoption itself. The second one is enhancing geoeconomic resilience and efficiency, and the third one is providing a backup rail for domestic retail payments, REIT UPI, should the existing system falter. In terms of the analytical framework, I focused on four key domains, which is the pre-existing digital infrastructure, the institutional readiness, which is the other policies that the central bank has proposed in terms of taxation, in terms of inclusion, in terms of, you know, banking, the innovation attempts by public sector and private sector banks, the tech capacity of the country in general, I’m also seeing external regulatory and geopolitical pressures, so a lot of dialogues that are at G20s, at WIZ, at BRICS, and the sanction risk that I have already mentioned, there’s also the idea of design architecture, which is how is the central bank thinking about the innovation at the core of the technological architecture itself. So it could be a centralized core, it’s, you know, are they offering an offline functionality, or is it programmable at any level. The cross-cutting assumption is that the strategic and sovereignty logic is ultimately sort of outweighing inclusion expectations in this framework. So I chose a qualitative study for this because the pilot is still in development, there’s not a lot that has happened, but we are still seeing works in terms of, you know, adoption. So I managed to conduct eight interviews across domains and stakeholders. I spoke to policy people, I spoke to fintechs, I spoke to banks, also some consultants who were closely linked with the central bank in the development of the project. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to speak to any of the central bank folks, but I’m always trying. I looked at the official documents. I also gathered some contextual data from the pilot dashboard and also the trade statistics that might strengthen the wholesale adoption. So I’m being shown a timer, I’ll quickly move on. So the key points here that I want to emphasize on is that, and also key findings, were that the retail side of CBDC in India, the adoption stays marginal and it will remain very low if UPI remains the dominant and a subsidized method of payment. The government is already supporting it to the core. So this alternative to UPI is not going to work if that technology remains dominant. This was supported during the interviews and it’s also supported by the data that I collected. The strategic priority for CBDC arises from international engagement and geopolitical shocks. In 2022, there was a G20 Marrakesh meeting that happened and several interviewees suggested that the uptake of the pilot really began after that. So in the bunch of countries that are exploring CBDCs, almost all of the G20 countries have a pilot and it was discussed during that meeting. So it appears to be a tick box attempt, at least at the retail level, where the central banks have launched a pilot and now they’re just trying to figure out what the use cases are of that. So this is the inclusion outcome, which is linked to the institutional design and the institutional readiness. We are also seeing through the internal policies that the government is really making it common. complicated for the merchants to stay on board with complicated tax laws, et cetera. So it’s obviously the design does not offer an offline feature which keeps a lot of marginalized population excluded from this, but they’re also launching new, they’re also suggesting new policies that are keeping people who are already on cashless economy to go outside of that. And then there’s the sovereignty and the strategic angle to it. I’ll skip all of that, probably it will be raised in her Q&A, but one important point that I would like to focus on is, yeah, the privacy, the cybersecurity, and the surveillance angle, which is, as of now, the way the pilot is working out, there’s a huge risk of centralization, not just in India, but this can be extrapolated to a lot of other countries as well. There’s a single sovereign ledger which is not on a decentralized basis, it has a single point of control. We have a risk of, we have security risk, we have privacy risk, and we have already seen all of these appear in previous cases with identity and the existing digital payment rate. So that’s where I’ll stop with just a quick point that this is still a work in progress, so I would greatly appreciate suggestions and feedbacks and, of course, questions. Thank you.

Sophie Hoogenboom: All right, perfect, thank you so much. Then I would like to spend the last seven minutes to ask the floor if there’s any questions. I don’t see any questions in the chat currently, but if there are, please raise your hand. Are there any questions here in the hall? Two? Shall I go first? Yes, go ahead.

Jamal Shahin: Hi, thank you. Can you hear me? I can’t hear myself, can you? Oh, that’s funny. hear myself. Anyway, thank you very much to both of you. Despite the different topics, I think I have questions for both of you and I’ll try and make them very to the point. Chelsea, really interesting to see this shift towards a more securitization approach after Cambridge Analytica, I think, in the proposals that came out of the law. I was actually interested, so in thinking about that securitization angle, whether that fits into your research kind of take, kind of thinking about, you know, theories of securitization and so on. But I was also wanting to ask two very specific questions and they come from an academic side, but also being a parent of a child who’s having to deal with this. So, I don’t know how much of this is emotion and analysis, but I’ve been very curious to see how in the European Union context, at least right now, you can’t avoid walking around Brussels without seeing posters that are sponsored by META, which is saying, we are asking, we are begging the European Union to impose parental controls on our platforms. I find this really interesting, that it’s really Instagram, you know, it’s META that’s saying, can you please give us the obligation to do parental controls, as if they couldn’t do it themselves? And, you know, why is this, why is there this relationship between the company, the private sector and the public sector in that way? And then there was one thing you said specifically in one of your points, you talked about parents’ choice of platforms. I find this interesting because having a 16-year-old who decides what platforms he uses, and not me, I find, I was also wondering how does that fit in? you know the platforms actually make themselves more attractive to different age groups at different moments. I was wondering what role do I have in choosing that? And that fits into a narrative that I’ve seen across the central and centre-right political parties in the European Parliament that are actually trying to push the responsibility away from government more to parents and I find that a bit worrying that then we’re told you’re responsible for choosing the platforms that your children are on. That was the first question, which was long, sorry Sophie. Second question, Vahisha, is much quicker. I was really interested in the map to see that the United States is not grey, not blue, not green, not yellow, it’s white. So nothing’s happening there and I think that’s that’s explainable, easily explainable because of the private sector involvement, but does that actually help your storyline in fact from the beginning? And then another thing that I wanted to ask was, we’ve been hearing a lot in the European Union about national, well, European solutions to certain core infrastructure issues such as payments, right? And this CBDC, the acronym, you know, and all of the stuff that goes around that to me seems to be part of the NDS stack, which are put against the Eurostack, and I’m wondering how that fits into that whole narrative about the India stack in fact. Thank you, sorry, bye.

Sophie Hoogenboom: All right, thank you very much for your question. I think I would like to go to Tricia and then we and then we round it up. Thank you.

Trisha Meyer: Thank you. Tricia Meyer, University of Brussels. Chelsea, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you in person. I was wondering if you could comment to the fact that in your data set, I think you had about 30 bills of which a proposal of which only three were adopted. I think this is fairly common for the U.S. context, but if there’s anything to be said there of why there’s so few, and so long ago actually, almost 15 years ago, and the second, whether you’d consider looking at Snapchat as well, just considering where kids are currently. Thanks.

Chelsea Horne: I’ll take those ones, because they’re more recent. So, yes, it does track with a lot of different bills, is that we propose a lot of legislation, and very few actually makes it into law. So that is pretty similar. There’s a few bills that are getting more attention, such as COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act in the United States, which has been proposed a few times at this point, and it’s getting increasing bipartisan support. There’s a lot of conversation around it, lots of concerns, so that’s a whole issue in itself. So there’s been a lot of attention to it recently, let’s say, but not necessarily any action taken in terms of law becoming law, or proposed bill becoming law. And then, yes, and so I’m planning on extending the study, so Snapchat is the number one next thing on the list. And then over to your questions, I’ll be very brief. Security’s interesting because it’s often pitted as being oppositional to privacy. Previous part of the study was showing, actually, that we see privacy and security being used almost synonymously, which can lead to confusions about what is actually privacy. So that conflation of the two terms, and them being as being oppositional, that’s a really, really fascinating and important part of this, so 100% agree. Meta asking to be regulated, in particular, there’s, I think, 2018 and 2019, a very famous Washington Post article where Mark Zuckerberg is also making the plea, like, hey, please regulate us. But why don’t they do it themselves, I think is the question. I think we have some of the employees who work here. So let’s ask them together. And then parental choices, a couple of the platforms here studied, in order for the child to have the account, the parent must approve the account. So that’s what I mean also by choices, is that the kid couldn’t have the account unless the parent said, yes, I approve. So that leads to part of the choices. And there’s different ways. Some of it is a parent has an account, and then it links to the child’s account. Some of it is all done through the parent’s account. And one is the child’s account, but yet the parent must be able to view things. So also the way the parental controls are applied, that’s very disparate as well. Let’s try to be very succinct.

Vagisha Srivastava: Thank you very much. So I’ll stick to two minutes. Thank you for your question. I’m very glad to receive one. So you’re right that United States is almost absent in the CBDC development stage. And that’s primarily because, of course, there’s lobbying by the private banks that they don’t want an alternative to come from the government. But also in the recent executive order that was launched this year, January 2025, clearly stated that the US is now going to innovate with stable coins and other alternatives and try to integrate it with the dollar rather than focusing on a centrally specialized digital currency. In terms of EU dialogue, you’re correct. This is kind of an attempt to build core infrastructure for the country in India as well. But one thing that’s surprising is that in none of the policy notes or annual reports or speeches by the central bank do they mention sovereignty as a core cause for them to develop it. So the narrative is linked to inclusion and not sovereignty, but I think it would be strategically much better if they started using that as an approach, especially in terms of the involvement that India has in the BRICS dialogues and in the G20 discussions and within the BIS as well with respect to CBDC development. It’s not a part of India’s tag just yet. They haven’t labeled it under that. I feel that even the central bank knows at the moment that at least within the retail sector domestically, this is an innovation in search of a problem. They don’t have a clear use case yet. So they’re still figuring that out. I feel like once that pipeline is figured out, they might declare it as a part of India’s tag, but so far that dialogue does not exist. I do think, however, that this will become a part of the critical infrastructure in India if this develops to a point where the government feels that it’s important to do that, which is a welcome step. But yeah, those dialogues are non-existent at this point. So, yeah.

Sophie Hoogenboom: All right, well, thank you. Thank you for our panelists for these excellent presentations, and thank you for everyone who participated in the morning section of this program. We will now go and have lunch, and we will convene at 1.30 with our panel discussion with the a provocative title, Should Wisses End? So I’m looking forward to seeing all of you back into this workshop room six at 1.30. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.

Agreement points

Current governance frameworks are inadequate for emerging digital technologies

Speakers

– Jonathan Liebenau
– Joanna Kulesza
– Olga Kyryliuk

Arguments

LEO satellites represent a fundamental shift in internet infrastructure with significant economic and geopolitical implications, requiring new governance frameworks

Current international legal frameworks for outer space are inadequate for governing LEO satellites, creating jurisdictional challenges and sovereignty issues

Multi-stakeholder governance models face implementation challenges and lack enforcement mechanisms to translate principles into action

Summary

All three speakers agree that existing governance structures – whether for LEO satellites, outer space law, or multi-stakeholder processes – are insufficient for addressing current technological challenges and require fundamental reform or new approaches.

Topics

Legal and regulatory | Infrastructure

The gap between policy principles and practical implementation is a critical challenge

Speakers

– Olga Kyryliuk
– Chelsea Horne
– Dennis Redeker

Arguments

Multi-stakeholder governance models face implementation challenges and lack enforcement mechanisms to translate principles into action

The effectiveness of parental controls as a solution versus corporate posturing remains questionable

Digital bills of rights reveal four distinct discourse coalitions in global digital governance, with civil society being the dominant voice

Summary

These speakers identify a consistent pattern where governance principles, whether in multi-stakeholder processes, parental controls, or digital rights frameworks, struggle to translate into effective real-world implementation.

Topics

Legal and regulatory | Human rights

Private sector actors are strategically shifting responsibility while maintaining control

Speakers

– Chelsea Horne
– Jamal Shahin

Arguments

Parental controls represent a shift of responsibility from platforms to parents, with inconsistent implementation across different platforms

Private platforms are strategically shifting regulatory responsibility to governments while maintaining operational control

Summary

Both speakers observe that private companies, particularly social media platforms, are using regulatory mechanisms to shift responsibility to other actors (parents, governments) while retaining operational control and avoiding accountability.

Topics

Legal and regulatory | Human rights

Research methodologies need enhancement through computational and comparative approaches

Speakers

– Ignacio Castro
– Dennis Redeker

Arguments

Natural language processing tools could enhance empirical analysis of technology governance research

Digital bills of rights reveal four distinct discourse coalitions in global digital governance, with civil society being the dominant voice

Summary

Both speakers advocate for more sophisticated analytical approaches, with Castro suggesting NLP tools and Redeker acknowledging the need for more efficient scaling and comparative analysis in governance research.

Topics

Infrastructure | Legal and regulatory

Similar viewpoints

Both speakers argue that official narratives about technology deployment (commercial broadband for LEOs, financial inclusion for CBDCs) mask underlying strategic and sovereignty motivations, with government and military applications being the real drivers.

Speakers

– Jonathan Liebenau
– Vagisha Srivastava

Arguments

The business models of LEO constellations are driven by government procurement and military applications rather than purely commercial considerations

India’s CBDC initiative is primarily driven by strategic and sovereignty concerns rather than financial inclusion objectives

Topics

Economic | Infrastructure

Both speakers highlight how new digital infrastructure technologies (LEO satellites and CBDCs) create significant privacy and surveillance risks due to centralized control and unclear jurisdictional frameworks.

Speakers

– Joanna Kulesza
– Vagisha Srivastava

Arguments

LEO satellites create new cybersecurity vulnerabilities and data access challenges that require international cooperation

CBDC development creates significant privacy and surveillance risks through centralized sovereign ledgers

Topics

Cybersecurity | Human rights

Both speakers demonstrate how political narratives and framings (flexilateralism, emerging technologies) are constructed concepts that serve strategic purposes rather than neutral descriptive categories.

Speakers

– Roberta Haar
– Apolline Rolland

Arguments

The Biden administration adopted a ‘flexilateralist’ approach that blends multilateral rhetoric with isolationist policies, particularly regarding China and strategic technologies

The concept of ’emerging technologies’ in cybersecurity is politically constructed and shapes funding priorities and governance approaches

Topics

Legal and regulatory | Economic

Unexpected consensus

The limitations of multi-stakeholder governance despite broad support for the concept

Speakers

– Olga Kyryliuk
– Milton Mueller
– Christopher Yu

Arguments

Multi-stakeholder governance models face implementation challenges and lack enforcement mechanisms to translate principles into action

The creation of an ‘ICANN for LEOs’ faces fundamental questions about what resources would be governed and how authority would be established

Multi-stakeholder governance research needs to move from descriptive analysis to prescriptive institutional design

Explanation

Despite the IGF being a multi-stakeholder forum, there was unexpected consensus among speakers about the fundamental limitations of multi-stakeholder approaches, with even supportive voices like Kyryliuk acknowledging serious implementation gaps.

Topics

Legal and regulatory | Infrastructure

The inadequacy of current assessment methodologies for emerging technologies

Speakers

– Apolline Rolland
– Jonathan Liebenau

Arguments

Current technology assessment methodologies are inadequate for evaluating cybersecurity as an emerging technology field

LEO satellites represent a fundamental shift in internet infrastructure with significant economic and geopolitical implications, requiring new governance frameworks

Explanation

Both speakers, working in different domains (cybersecurity assessment and LEO satellites), independently concluded that existing evaluation frameworks are insufficient for their respective technologies, suggesting a broader systemic issue with technology governance methodologies.

Topics

Cybersecurity | Infrastructure

Overall assessment

Summary

The speakers demonstrated significant consensus around the inadequacy of current governance frameworks, the gap between principles and implementation, and the strategic behavior of both state and private actors in technology governance. There was also agreement on the need for more sophisticated research methodologies and the limitations of existing multi-stakeholder approaches.

Consensus level

High level of consensus on structural problems in technology governance, with implications suggesting the need for fundamental reforms rather than incremental improvements. The consensus spans different technology domains (LEO satellites, CBDCs, parental controls, digital rights) indicating systemic rather than domain-specific challenges.

Different viewpoints

Multi-stakeholder governance effectiveness and implementation

Speakers

– Olga Kyryliuk
– Dennis Redeker
– Milton Mueller

Arguments

Multi-stakeholder governance models face implementation challenges and lack enforcement mechanisms to translate principles into action

Digital bills of rights reveal four distinct discourse coalitions in global digital governance, with civil society being the dominant voice

The creation of an “ICANN for LEOs” faces fundamental questions about what resources would be governed and how authority would be established

Summary

Kyryliuk argues multi-stakeholder models lack enforcement power and fail to translate dialogue into policy, while Redeker’s research shows civil society dominance in digital governance discourse. Mueller questions the feasibility of creating new multi-stakeholder institutions without clear governance targets.

Topics

Legal and regulatory | Infrastructure

Purpose and effectiveness of parental controls

Speakers

– Chelsea Horne
– Jamal Shahin

Arguments

The effectiveness of parental controls as a solution versus corporate posturing remains questionable

Private platforms are strategically shifting regulatory responsibility to governments while maintaining operational control

Summary

Horne questions whether parental controls are genuine solutions or corporate posturing to shift responsibility, while Shahin argues platforms are strategically manipulating regulatory frameworks to maintain control while appearing compliant.

Topics

Human rights | Legal and regulatory

Sovereignty versus inclusion in CBDC development

Speakers

– Vagisha Srivastava
– Jamal Shahin

Arguments

India’s CBDC initiative is primarily driven by strategic and sovereignty concerns rather than financial inclusion objectives

LEO satellites create new dynamics in internet access that require consideration of equality and sustainable development frameworks

Summary

Srivastava argues CBDCs are primarily about sovereignty despite inclusion rhetoric, while Shahin emphasizes the importance of equality frameworks and sustainable development in technology governance.

Topics

Economic | Development

Unexpected differences

Role of academic research in policy implementation

Speakers

– Olga Kyryliuk
– Jonathan Liebenau

Arguments

Academic research on internet governance needs better integration with policy-making processes to achieve real-world impact

Much of the evidence that you’re using relates to preferences and positions rather than actions and outcomes

Explanation

Unexpectedly, both academics disagree on the value and application of current research approaches – Kyryliuk argues for better integration of existing research into policy, while Liebenau questions the fundamental approach of focusing on preferences rather than outcomes.

Topics

Legal and regulatory

Technology assessment methodologies

Speakers

– Apolline Rolland
– Ignacio Castro

Arguments

Current technology assessment methodologies are inadequate for evaluating cybersecurity as an emerging technology field

Natural language processing tools could enhance empirical analysis of technology governance research

Explanation

Unexpected disagreement on research methodology – Rolland argues current assessment tools are fundamentally flawed for cybersecurity, while Castro suggests computational methods could improve existing approaches rather than replace them.

Topics

Cybersecurity | Infrastructure

Overall assessment

Summary

The main areas of disagreement center on governance effectiveness, the balance between sovereignty and inclusion in technology development, and the role of private actors versus public regulation. Speakers also disagreed on research methodologies and the relationship between academic analysis and policy implementation.

Disagreement level

Moderate to high disagreement with significant implications. The disagreements reveal fundamental tensions in internet governance between different approaches to multi-stakeholder governance, the role of sovereignty in technology development, and the effectiveness of current regulatory frameworks. These disagreements suggest the field lacks consensus on core governance principles and implementation strategies, which could hinder coordinated global responses to emerging technology challenges.

Partial agreements

Similar viewpoints

Both speakers argue that official narratives about technology deployment (commercial broadband for LEOs, financial inclusion for CBDCs) mask underlying strategic and sovereignty motivations, with government and military applications being the real drivers.

Speakers

– Jonathan Liebenau
– Vagisha Srivastava

Arguments

The business models of LEO constellations are driven by government procurement and military applications rather than purely commercial considerations

India’s CBDC initiative is primarily driven by strategic and sovereignty concerns rather than financial inclusion objectives

Topics

Economic | Infrastructure

Both speakers highlight how new digital infrastructure technologies (LEO satellites and CBDCs) create significant privacy and surveillance risks due to centralized control and unclear jurisdictional frameworks.

Speakers

– Joanna Kulesza
– Vagisha Srivastava

Arguments

LEO satellites create new cybersecurity vulnerabilities and data access challenges that require international cooperation

CBDC development creates significant privacy and surveillance risks through centralized sovereign ledgers

Topics

Cybersecurity | Human rights

Both speakers demonstrate how political narratives and framings (flexilateralism, emerging technologies) are constructed concepts that serve strategic purposes rather than neutral descriptive categories.

Speakers

– Roberta Haar
– Apolline Rolland

Arguments

The Biden administration adopted a ‘flexilateralist’ approach that blends multilateral rhetoric with isolationist policies, particularly regarding China and strategic technologies

The concept of ’emerging technologies’ in cybersecurity is politically constructed and shapes funding priorities and governance approaches

Topics

Legal and regulatory | Economic

Key takeaways

LEO satellites represent a critical shift in internet infrastructure governance, requiring new international legal frameworks beyond current outer space treaties

Current multilateral approaches to technology governance are fragmenting, with states adopting ‘flexilateralist’ strategies that blend multilateral rhetoric with unilateral actions

Digital bills of rights analysis reveals four distinct discourse coalitions in global governance, with civil society being the dominant voice but Global South representation remaining limited

Multi-stakeholder governance models face significant implementation gaps, lacking enforcement mechanisms to translate principles into concrete policy actions

Platform governance of child online safety increasingly shifts responsibility from companies to parents through inconsistent parental control mechanisms

CBDCs are primarily driven by strategic sovereignty concerns rather than financial inclusion, creating new surveillance and privacy risks

The concept of ’emerging technologies’ in cybersecurity is politically constructed and shapes funding priorities, often overlooking critical legacy infrastructure

Academic research on internet governance needs better integration with policy-making processes to achieve real-world impact

Resolutions and action items

REMIT project to produce policy recommendations in final stage of consortium research

Scenario testing workshops scheduled for 2025 in Helsinki (September), Rome (January and April), and Leuven (fall)

REMIT conference planned for Rome in April 2025

Lightning talk #80 scheduled for Wednesday at 2 PM to discuss digital bills of rights dataset

Continued development of interactive interface for exploring digital bills of rights database

Extension of parental controls study to include Snapchat platform

Follow-up research planned on comparative institutional analysis of multi-stakeholder models

Unresolved issues

Whether an ‘ICANN for LEOs’ is feasible and what specific resources it would govern

How to establish authority and enforcement mechanisms for LEO satellite governance

Balancing privacy and security concerns in cybersecurity governance of emerging technologies

Addressing the implementation gap between multi-stakeholder dialogue and concrete policy outcomes

Determining appropriate levels of parental control versus platform responsibility for child online safety

Resolving jurisdictional conflicts arising from national legislation on outer space resources

Integrating Global South perspectives more effectively in digital governance frameworks

Establishing viable use cases for CBDCs beyond strategic sovereignty objectives

Creating pathways for academic research to influence actual policy-making processes

Suggested compromises

Developing hybrid governance models that combine multi-stakeholder participation with enforcement mechanisms

Creating regional approaches to technology governance that can later be harmonized globally

Establishing transparency requirements for private actors in critical infrastructure governance

Implementing graduated approaches to parental controls that balance child safety with privacy rights

Developing confidence-building measures for international cooperation on cybersecurity similar to UN norms

Creating sector-specific technology assessment organizations rather than universal frameworks

Establishing connective tissue between digital rights bills and regulatory frameworks through IGF processes

Balancing national sovereignty concerns with international cooperation needs in CBDC development

The answer for Leos cannot be limited to how many people use the system or even how high a price the market can bear. The answer will have to come back to the spillover effects and some guess as to what the widespread economic benefits of the system might be over a relatively long period of time.

Speaker

Jonathan Liebenau

Reason

This comment reframes the entire discussion about LEO satellite valuation from a narrow technical/commercial perspective to a broader economic systems thinking approach. It challenges the conventional metrics used to evaluate infrastructure projects and introduces the concept of spillover effects as the true measure of value.

Impact

This shifted the conversation from technical specifications and business models to fundamental questions about how we measure the societal value of critical infrastructure. It provided the theoretical foundation for later discussions about governance frameworks and regulatory approaches.

Maybe this is the time to speak about changing the traditional paradigm for jurisdiction in outer space… We are witnessing jurisdictional challenges and one could say overreaching sovereignty claims from states that merit rediscussing the paradigm we have introduced in mid-1900s, 1960s, 1970s.

Speaker

Joanna Kulesza

Reason

This comment directly challenges the foundational legal framework governing outer space activities, suggesting that decades-old treaties are inadequate for current technological realities. It introduces the provocative idea that traditional sovereignty concepts may need fundamental revision.

Impact

This comment sparked intense discussion about whether existing multilateral frameworks are sufficient or if entirely new governance models are needed. It led to the debate about creating an ‘ICANN for LEOs’ and fundamentally questioned the adequacy of current international law for emerging technologies.

So when you talk about an ICANN for Leos, what is it exactly that you are talking about governing? What is the resource and how would decisions be made and how would the authority to make them be established?

Speaker

Milton Mueller

Reason

This comment cuts through abstract discussions about governance models to ask fundamental practical questions about institutional design. It challenges proponents to move beyond analogies to concrete specifics about what would actually be governed and how.

Impact

This intervention forced the discussion to become more concrete and practical, moving from theoretical governance concepts to specific institutional design challenges. It revealed the complexity of translating successful governance models from one domain to another and highlighted the need for clearer thinking about what exactly needs to be governed in the LEO space.

The question should probably not be only on what technologies are emerging, but who decides what gets seen and what gets missed. And that goes through evaluation.

Speaker

Apolline Rolland

Reason

This comment shifts the focus from technical characteristics of emerging technologies to the political economy of attention and priority-setting in technology governance. It reveals how seemingly neutral technical assessments are actually deeply political processes.

Impact

This reframed the entire discussion about emerging technologies from a technical evaluation problem to a political power analysis. It connected to broader themes about who has voice in governance processes and how institutional biases shape what gets prioritized in technology policy.

Much of the evidence that you’re using relates to preferences and positions rather than actions and outcomes. And I’m concerned that, at least in some future step of the research, there’s a more clear relationship that’s established.

Speaker

Jonathan Liebenau

Reason

This methodological critique challenges the entire research approach by pointing out a fundamental gap between stated preferences and actual behaviors/outcomes. It questions whether analyzing what people say they want is sufficient for understanding governance dynamics.

Impact

This comment prompted serious methodological reflection across multiple presentations and led to discussions about how to better connect discourse analysis with actual policy implementation and outcomes. It highlighted a key limitation in much internet governance research that focuses on stated positions rather than actual practices.

We need governance frameworks that speak to both realities. So yes, multi-stakeholderism is still worth defending, but not uncritically. We need to strengthen it with the safeguards for meaningful participation, mechanisms for accountability, and pathways to translate talk into policy.

Speaker

Olga Kyryliuk

Reason

This comment provides a nuanced critique of multi-stakeholderism that neither dismisses it entirely nor accepts it uncritically. It identifies specific areas for improvement while maintaining commitment to inclusive governance principles.

Impact

This intervention helped synthesize many of the tensions raised throughout the discussion and provided a constructive path forward. It acknowledged the limitations of current multi-stakeholder approaches while offering concrete suggestions for improvement, helping to move the discussion from critique to potential solutions.

Overall assessment

These key comments fundamentally shaped the discussion by challenging basic assumptions about technology governance, infrastructure valuation, and institutional design. They moved the conversation from technical details to deeper questions about power, legitimacy, and effectiveness in global governance. The comments created a progression from identifying problems (inadequate legal frameworks, measurement challenges) to questioning fundamental approaches (who decides what matters, how do we connect discourse to action) to proposing constructive reforms (strengthening multi-stakeholderism with accountability mechanisms). Together, they demonstrated the complexity of governing emerging technologies and the need for more sophisticated approaches that account for both technical realities and political dynamics. The discussion evolved from sector-specific technical issues to broader questions about democratic participation, institutional effectiveness, and the future of international cooperation in technology governance.

How can we establish a more consolidated jurisdictional framework for low-Earth orbit satellites, or whether the existing framework is sufficient?

Speaker

Joanna Kulesza

Explanation

The current jurisdictional framework based on place of launch is being challenged by increasing private actor involvement and national laws that may contradict traditional arrangements

What specific resource would an ‘ICANN for LEOs’ govern, and how would decisions be made and authority established?

Speaker

Milton Mueller

Explanation

The concept of creating a multi-stakeholder governance body for LEO satellites lacks clarity on what centralized resource would be governed, unlike ICANN’s management of domain names and IP addresses

Should satellites be brought into existing multi-stakeholder bodies like the IETF, and what leverage exists to make this happen?

Speaker

Ignacio Castro

Explanation

There’s minimal presence of satellite companies in current internet governance forums, raising questions about integration and enforcement mechanisms

How can stakeholders not already at the table (like the Astronomical Union) be better included in satellite governance discussions?

Speaker

Alejandro Pisanti

Explanation

Current governance structures primarily include operators and governments, but other affected stakeholders like astronomers concerned about satellite interference are marginalized

How can the common heritage of mankind principle be extended to internet infrastructure governance, particularly given developments in outer space and high seas treaties?

Speaker

Alexander Klimberg

Explanation

Recent developments in international law regarding common heritage principles could potentially be applied to digital public infrastructure and internet governance

How can natural language processing tools complement the manual coding analysis of digital bills of rights?

Speaker

Ignacio Castro

Explanation

The large dataset of 321 digital bills of rights could benefit from computational analysis methods to enhance the hand-coding approach

How can the research move from analyzing preferences and positions to examining actual actions and outcomes?

Speaker

Jonathan Liebenau

Explanation

There’s a risk that policy documents and stated preferences may be decoupled from real-world implementation and results

What are the learnings from this research for the Global South, particularly going beyond multi-stakeholderism?

Speaker

Satish Babu (online)

Explanation

The research findings need to be examined for their relevance and applicability to Global South contexts and governance approaches

How can multi-stakeholder frameworks be designed with better enforcement mechanisms and pathways from principles to policy implementation?

Speaker

Christopher Yu

Explanation

Current multi-stakeholder approaches often lack mechanisms to translate discussions and principles into concrete policy actions

How do parental controls influence parents’ choice of platforms for their children?

Speaker

Chelsea Horne

Explanation

Platforms with more comprehensive parental controls (like TikTok) versus those with fewer options (like YouTube) may affect parental decision-making

What is the actual role of parental controls – are they genuine solutions or merely platform posturing to shift responsibility?

Speaker

Chelsea Horne

Explanation

There’s debate about whether parental controls represent meaningful safety measures or are primarily used by platforms to deflect regulatory pressure

How does the securitization of online safety policy after Cambridge Analytica fit into broader theories of securitization?

Speaker

Jamal Shahin

Explanation

The shift from technology-focused to crime/law enforcement-focused legislation around parental controls suggests a securitization process that warrants theoretical analysis

Why do platforms like Meta actively request regulation for parental controls instead of implementing them voluntarily?

Speaker

Jamal Shahin

Explanation

The phenomenon of companies lobbying for their own regulation raises questions about corporate strategy and regulatory capture

How does India’s CBDC development relate to the broader India Stack versus other national digital infrastructure strategies?

Speaker

Jamal Shahin

Explanation

The CBDC initiative should be analyzed within the context of competing national digital infrastructure approaches and sovereignty concerns

What viable use cases exist for India’s CBDC given the success of existing UPI infrastructure?

Speaker

Vagisha Srivastava

Explanation

The government is still struggling to identify clear use cases for CBDC when existing digital payment systems are already successful

How can cybersecurity be better evaluated as an emerging technology given its unique characteristics?

Speaker

Apolline Rolland

Explanation

Existing technology assessment tools don’t adequately capture cybersecurity’s dynamic, non-linear, and relational nature

Who decides what emerging technologies get attention and funding, and what gets overlooked in the process?

Speaker

Apolline Rolland

Explanation

The political construction of ’emerging’ technologies affects resource allocation and may neglect critical but mundane infrastructure needs