A ‘Global Digital Compact (GDC)’ is under development at the United Nations (UN) this year, which aims to outline shared principles and objectives for an open, free and secure digital future for the world.
The Zero Draft (essentially the first draft) of the GDC was published on 2 April 2024 and was presented to UN Member States on 5 April 2024. It will be negotiated by governments over the next few months and is scheduled to be adopted at the Summit of the Future in September 2024.
In keeping with auDA’s commitment to multi-stakeholder internet governance, we’ve been following the development of the GDC closely. In 2023, we wrote about it in a GDC blog post and in our Internet Governance Roadmap, and we also commissioned research on stakeholder input to the GDC.
This year, we participated directly in the UN consultation process (see our prepared statement and the submission we made jointly with CIRA, InternetNZ and Nominet).
Our initial view on the Zero Draft is broadly positive, though we believe there is room for improvement.
We support the GDC’s objectives, which include closing digital divides and accelerating progress across the Sustainable Development Goals, expanding opportunities for inclusion in the digital economy and governing technologies for humanity.
We are pleased to see the Zero Draft’s acknowledgement of the technical community as a stakeholder group. It includes a commitment to the vision and outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), and reaffirms a commitment to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). These are among the initiatives auDA called for in our contributions to the UN consultations.
While we welcome the commitment to the IGF, we would however like to see clearer language than the phrase ‘multi-stakeholder cooperation’ across the GDC.
Multi-stakeholder approaches incorporate the views and the expertise of all stakeholders when considering digital challenges and possible solutions. Given the global nature of these challenges and the range of stakeholders with an interest, a multi-stakeholder approach has much to offer digital governance more broadly. Cooperation by itself is not adequate as a term and we will advocate for multi-stakeholder governance to be recognised in the GDC.
We also have some concerns with the proposed establishment of new processes with a strong UN-centric focus within the draft.
While the UN, and individual national governments, have a critical role within a multi-stakeholder governance system, it should not be the dominant one. We will continue to advocate for multi-stakeholder governance where all stakeholders, including governments, participate, to be unambiguously reflected in the GDC.
We welcome the several broad references to building on existing internet governance processes and mechanisms, though the proposals appear to be unstructured and incomplete. For example there is no mention of the International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU’s) role in progressing digital connectivity or the WSIS action lines.
We are also concerned that the creation of several new processes is an unnecessary burden on already-scarce resources. Our consistent position has been that the GDC should not duplicate existing processes and should not create new structures where existing ones could be strengthened and improved.
We consider that many of the new proposals in the Zero Draft could be consolidated within existing processes, including those established under the WSIS process. For example, the Zero Draft proposes establishing a new high-level meeting to review the GDC every two years. Given the similarity in scope, we consider a more efficient approach would be to establish a high-level track within the IGF to consider and report on progress of both WSIS and the GDC.
The Zero Draft also proposes a new annual dialogue on artificial intelligence which appears to have a very similar focus to the ITU’s annual AI for Good conference. Improving, strengthening and streamlining existing processes, identifying and working with existing specialist UN bodies (e.g. the ITU, UN Development Programme, UNESCO) wherever possible would be a more efficient use of resources.
On balance, we consider the Zero Draft to contain many positive elements and we look forward to working with Australian Government negotiators and others in the multi-stakeholder community to make further improvements as the GDC continues to take shape.