Centre news
30.08.2022

Expert panel identifies particularities and challenges of governing digital networks

During a high-level seminar co-organised with the European University Institute and the Oxford Internet Institute, experts discussed the particularities of digital network governance. They identified security, privacy and competition concerns as the debate's drivers and propose a reform of the multi-stakeholder model governing the internet. 

The paper at hand defines the sessions' key findings. While the relationship between global rules and what they regulate is hard to grasp, one can discern a growing demand for rules with security, privacy and competition concerns driving the debate. Still, governing is made complicated through the internet's different layers, as in its physical and logical architecture, services and data. Also, current cooperation agreements are not up to the task with diverging interests of the actors involved hindering addressing privacy concerns. Last, regulating the competition conditions of digital companies and platforms has proved to be difficult. To produce relief, the latter should be strengthened and a set of to principles, rules and bold initiatives instated to limit pluralism and fragmentation.

Also, the e-book at hand features the seminar's key note speech by Caroline Atkinson. She argues that in the field of digital governance, what exactly needs to be governed and how, is still up for debate. She identifies five policy fields to be addressed in this respect: competition; content; copyright; data and privacy; and AI.