The Global Solutions Initiative has therefore set itself the goal of actively advancing the debate on digital governance and developing proposals in close cooperation between research, business and politics that will lead to a comprehensive reorientation of the digital space in the spirit of recoupling.
Revisiting Digital Governance
Together with the German Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection, a comprehensive discourse has been initiated that aims at maintaining the benefits of the digital world while recoupling the technological advances with economic and social progress.
The underlying vision for revisiting digital governance is a future in which:
- Digital property rights are strengthened. Users must be in full control of their individual data. Access to and control of common data is redistributed.
- Economic innovation is facilitated and competition in online markets enriched by applying anti-trust regulation.
- No company or institution holds key information on an individual without that person’s knowledge and consent.
- Economic, social or political manipulation will be illegal and auditable.
- Basic human rights will not be undermined by an opaque or pervasive surveillance capitalism.
- Freedom of association and collective bargaining will have the skills and the power to negotiate on behalf of users for a more equal use and financial terms with large data holders.
Resources
Experts
Revisiting Digital Governance - First proposal
Dennis J. Snower, President of the Global Solutions Initiative, Paul Twomey, Distinguished Fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation and ICANN-Co-Founder, and tech policy expert Maria Farrell have put up a proposal for revisiting digital governance that is compatible with and build upon the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the forthcoming e-Privacy Regulation, and the Digital Services Act and Data Act.
In their discussion paper, the three authors propose a new classification system for personal data. This system distinguishes between official data (data authenticated by official bodies), collective data (data that people agree to share with a pre-defined group for collective purposes) and privy data (data that is volunteered by the individual or inferred through their behaviour).
On this basis, the authors draft policy recommendations and implementation options that strengthen the digital property rights of users and at the same time provide for collective bargaining powers in the sense of trade unions and consumer protectors who act and negotiate on behalf of users.
Revisiting Digital Governance: Discussion paper
Revisiting Digital Governance was first published in the Social Macroeconomics Working Paper Series of the Blavatnik School of Governance, Oxford University, in September 2020. The authors lay out the problems associated with the current digital governance and propose policy recommendations as well as implementation options to recouple the technological advances with economic and social progress.
Read the paper under ‘Resources’, above.