Will the ambitious UN Summit of the Future just be a rehash of the past?

With little media attention, negotiations have begun for the United Nations’s September 2024 “Summit of the Future” in New York. This conference, which includes heads of state, reflects an ambitious plan by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres to address many major global topics, ranging from disarmament to climate change to economic development and more.

Supporters compare it to the 1945 San Francisco UN-Founding Conference in hopes it will change the world forever. Detractors describe it as a U.N. talk-a-thon on a grand scale.

Among the important sections of this summit is a proposed Global Digital Compact (GDC) that will address several key internet policy issues. These issues are ripe for this global summit because most are inherently international and have a large impact on geopolitics, economics and society. But, unlike disarmament and foreign aid, digital issues are often almost entirely in the realm of the private sector and outside of governments. More importantly, issues like internet privacy and internet free speech are difficult to define and subject to vastly different perspectives.

In an effort to give shape to the digital section of the summit and a GDC, Guterres issued a lengthy proposal in May calling for a global agreement covering eight digital issues, ranging from connecting everyone to the internet to regulating AI. The global response has largely been predictable and reflects both geopolitical conflicts around since the Cold War and internet conflicts around since the 1990s. 

Since the 1960s, developing countries (the Group of 77) have insisted that their top international priority is wealthy nations making major efforts to promote economic development among developing countries. To no one’s surprise, this theme dominates the G77’s and China’s joint GDC proposal.

Similarly, the U.S. has historically emphasized reliance on the private sector/market forces and cautioned against over-expansion of U.N. agencies. No one was surprised that these themes dominate America’s GDC proposal.

These competing emphases will be negotiated in any final GDC, with developing nations (usually joined by China and Russia) maneuvering with the U.S. and its close allies.

As the digital section of the summit, the GDC raises longstanding internet issues already the subject of international arrangements, practices and some agreements. Given the importance of these eight issues and of the summit, it’s worth taking a closer look at Guterres’s proposed topics (my terminology, not his).

Connect everyone to the internet and educate everyone on how to use it. Connecting everyone is already a top priority for most governments, although less has been systematically done on the ground to educate people on how to use it.

Use the internet/technology to support development in developing countries. Virtually all aid agencies already agree that technology increases efficiency, multiplying resources for development (although problems often arise with local maintenance).

Internet platforms should agree to standards promoting respect for human rights, including gender, labor and anti-discrimination. Essentially every internet platform already claims it respects human rights, and many participate in voluntary discussions about them.

Keep the internet operating without blanket or punitive shutdowns and open to contributions from anyone. More than elsewhere, the devil is in the details, and it is unlikely that even America (much less other countries) would agree to these if they were absolute or unconditional.

Develop voluntary programs to strengthen trust in internet services, such as standards, trust labels, review boards and agreements that focus on gender and children. Voluntary trust-enhancing internet programs have been around since the 1990s and are theoretically already supported by almost every government and internet business. The issue is always who actually decides who sets the standards, and who actually decides who gets on review boards.

Privacy protection on the internet should be required and the private sector should develop practices strengthening privacy. The struggle between privacy, law enforcement surveillance, national security-based intelligence surveillance and industry collection of personal information for targeted advertising has been a central feature of internet debates for decades. With decades of top-level government-industry-civil attention to internet privacy, what could a U.N. GDC add to this? Given the extremely high profile of internet privacy, this summit could not ignore privacy and, perhaps, it will provide greater input from developing countries.

AI and related technologies should be evaluated by U.N. agencies and global panels to consider global consequences, while voluntary standards and disclosures are pursued. Artificial intelligence has been massively hyped by media, governments and industry for about a year. Unlike privacy, AI has not yet been the subject of agreements, standards or regulations, so the summit and the GDC might create a home for international AI agreements. Since AI is now basically controlled by a few American and Chinese agencies and businesses, the question remains what they genuinely think of global AI negotiations. As I have written previously in this space, this could actually split the industry and agency players. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Recognize that global internet governance since the 1990s has been a hodgepodge of inter-governmental organizations, industry associations and private multi-stakeholder organizations; try to improve them and create some new organizations. Few internet issues have divided the U.S. and its closest allies from many other nations than the American-led perspective that the Internet should primarily be governed by the private sector, with limited government advice. The Sino-Russian-G77 perspective, by comparison, is that the internet should be governed primarily by governments, with the private sector offering advice.

European, Indian and other views on Internet governance are more sectoral and nuanced, however, making the situation fluid. The fact that so much of internet civil society and business is U.S.-centric guarantees that neither the American nor the China-Russia-G77 perspectives are likely to change, regardless of what the U.N. does.

Ultimately, with a few exceptions, not much envisioned for the forthcoming U.N. Summit of the Future on digital and internet issues is likely to change the internet policy landscape, although providing a new forum for high-level internet debates will strengthen the role of developing nations and open the door to new, institutional arrangements.

Roger Cochetti is an award-winning executive in the technology and commercial space industries and a former U.S. government official. He served as a senior executive with COMSAT, IBM, VeriSign and CompTIA, has helped found a number of nonprofits in the tech sector, and is the author of textbooks on the history of satellite communications.