Thematic Deep-Dive: Data protection

Guiding questions:

  1. Art. 17 ICCPR recognizes the individual right to privacy. How can governments, data protection authorities’ private companies, the scientific community and civil society work together to ensure personal data is processed, stored, secured and protected against misuse?
  2. What principles would support quality and interoperable data so that governments, international organizations, the private sector, civil society and individuals can contribute to and benefit from digital trade and economy and leave no one behind?
  3. Data is a key enabler of innovation and research. How can stakeholders leverage tools such as (pseudo)anonymization,1 encryption, portability, etc. to drive innovation and interoperability while protecting personal data?

Thematic Deep-Dive: Internet governance

Guiding questions:

  • Over the last twenty years the share of world’s population connected to the internet has more than quadrupled. New internet-based tools – from the smartphone to social media – have emerged and we are moving into an Internet of Things. How can we continue to ensure the unfragmented safe, global, secure, and inclusive internet?
  • The 2005 Tunis Agenda endorsed a multi-stakeholder approach to the governance of the internet. How have we succeeded in realizing vision? How do the roles and functions of various multi-stakeholder forums such as ICANN, IETF and the IGF come together to support internet governance? And how can they be strengthened?
  • How can governments, technical standard bodies, civil society, industry and all stakeholders work together for an open, indivisible, free, interoperable, global, secure, inclusive Internet?

Thematic Deep-Dive: Digital inclusion and connectivity

Guiding questions:

  1. How can governments, international organizations, private companies, and civil society work together to close the digital divide and improve access, skills, and meaningful connectivity for all?
  2. What actions should be taken to enable digital inclusion for all?
  3. What policies, frameworks and programs have proven to be most successful and should be scaled up and adapted to other contexts to foster digital inclusion?

Publication of Our Common Agenda

The UN Secretary-General issues the Our Common Agenda report, outlining his vision on the future of global cooperation. Among other elements, the Secretary-General envisions the adoption of a Global Digital Compact (GDC) to ‘outline shared principles for an open, free and secure digital future for all’. The GDC is to be agreed up during a Summit of the Future, planned for September 2024.