Digital tools and platforms empower individuals by offering access to global information and global connections, yet governance designers must strike a balance between autonomy and accountability when designing for these tools in a digital context.
The Biden administration has signaled its desire to restore multilateralism in global policymaking, and Congress should support this effort by passing digital governance frameworks.
Empowering People
An effective digital governance plan clarifies who’s in control of your agency’s digital properties, including high-level strategic direction, oversight and decision-making as well as day-to-day management of content coordination. A solid governance structure enhances public trust as well as organizational performance.
Digital empowerment empowers human participants to benefit from global information flows and technological innovation, hold governments accountable, advance economic growth, and expand social participation.
Digital governance models that promote transparency and democratization are vital to empowering people worldwide. Although domestic political dynamics may require careful handling, the United States should champion an effective digital governance model overseas and allocate additional funding through its FY20 Countering Chinese Influence Fund for norm-setting and regulation purposes.
Holding Governments Accountable
As organizations expand their digital footprints, maintaining oversight over information can become increasingly complex. This includes content found on websites, subsites, social media accounts, internal portals, apps and email marketing tools.
Governance decisions may also alienate human participants, such as when policies based on data-extract operational models breach user privacy and drive them toward state-controlled platforms (Newlands, 2021). Governance designers must remain cognizant of how such activities may increase coordination costs for network developers or contribute to platform abandonment.
Emerging and developed countries alike need an open model of digital governance that is both viable and open in design, to counter China and other large technology firms’ authoritarian rise. Achieve this requires striking an equilibrium between encouraging innovation while upholding democratic governance integrity.
Innovating Solutions
As organizations grow, it becomes more challenging to effectively oversee how information is shared online. Doing so requires coordination among various departments and stakeholders.
Governance decisions become more significant for exchange participants in digital contexts due to their ability to affect network size and value, creating new exigencies – such as exchange participants using exit strategies against governance designers (Zhang, Wang, Karahanna & Xu, 2022).
An effective digital governance strategy requires carefully calculated metrics and collaborative incentives tied to company objectives, along with an excellent education base and continuous learning. It also involves following emerging trends in digital economy, technology and governance – as well as gathering insight into how these technologies and solutions can be deployed efficiently and successfully.
Unaccountable Institutions
To hold their government accountable, citizens must be able to monitor and assess those in government–whether this means tracking corruption or checking justice systems impartiality. For democracy to succeed, such monitoring must take place both online and off.
Governance decisions can increase coordination costs for developers while alienating users (Newlands, 2021). Therefore, digital platforms must prioritize collaboration with civil society organizations and governments in order to close knowledge gaps and enhance oversight in an AI era.
While certain countries seek to institutionalize their vision of the internet in terms of national laws and data localization requirements, these efforts can threaten long-term stability and interoperability–increasing trade tensions between economic partners. To maintain leadership on this issue, the United States must adopt an assertive approach through bilateral channels and multilateral institutions.
Risks to Democracies
Digital governance presents novel challenges that cannot easily be translated to existing frameworks and analogies. Remaining sensitive to context is key, while process-oriented approaches tend to produce greater results than rigid rules.
One-size-fits-all models for content moderation or privacy regulations may fail to take account of cultural norms and global economic competition. Enforcing one standard globally may have unintended repercussions and diminish trust between institutions and societies.
An overly protective regulatory approach to online platforms can stifle innovation and result in platform closures–increasing costs for users while restricting free information sharing and exchange. Democracies must work together to shape technical standards; ultimately, the United States should use its bilateral channels and leadership at multilateral forums to galvanize global democracies towards creating consensus around digital governance principles that protect a free, open, interoperable internet.