Building on the discussion on „Human-centric digital governance” at the Global Solutions Summit 2021, the panel discussion “Building human-centred and sustainable digital governance” at the Global Solutions Summit 2022 discussed policy proposals to empower digital consumers while incentivizing innovation and enabling a green digital transformation.

Digital services have become an integral part of life for most of us. Although the digital revolution has unleashed new opportunities for economic, social and political exchange, many digital service providers have business models built on massive user surveillance, data aggregation, and manipulative, discriminatory software. A structural misalignment of interests between digital consumers and suppliers of digital services causes a variety of malfunctions: (1) economically, as it threatens the functioning of our economic market systems, and exposes users to manipulation of attention and behaviour; (2) socially, as it erodes appreciation for objective notions of truth, undermines democratic processes, weakens mental health, threatens human rights, and degrades social cohesion; (3) environmentally, as energy-hungry data centres and processes like tracking and behavioural advertising run many more operations than required for fulfilling the users’ request, and (4) individually, as it threatens peoples freedom, privacy and consumer choice and exposes consumers, businesses and governments to cybersecurity threats.

While governments have sought to respond through a fundamental rights and consumer protection approach, and recently in the EU through the Data Act, they have yet to address the broken market mechanism in the relationship between the individuals, digital service providers and third-party funders.