Leading Through Uncertainty and the Need to Reclaim Internet Freedom

In 2012, Vint Cerf – the “father of the Internet” – wrote an opinion piece for CNN, where he made a case for why the world must fight for Internet freedom. “The net’s future is far from assured, and history offers much warning,” Cerf wrote. “Within a few decades of Gutenberg’s creation, princes and priests moved to restrict the right to print books… We must make sure, collectively, that the Internet avoids a similar fate.”

Almost 15 years later, this sentiment continues to be relevant.

The next few years will be tough on democracies. It is anticipated that democratic institutions will be under immeasurable pressure, their vulnerabilities will be exploited, and democratic norms will undergo an endurance test. Competitive authoritarianism will become the norm if the cases of Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela, and Tunisia are any indication. As this new reality settles, democracies will undergo significant reordering, mainly driven by complacency and self-deprecation. New power structures will emerge, while many of the old levers of control will dissipate and cease to exist. A new constellation of order and a new class of governance exporters will emerge on the global scene. The world will become less collaborative, less open, and less interconnected.

Inevitably, the Internet will be caught in the middle of this transformation. Ever since it pushed through traditional technologies and edged instantaneous communications, the Internet has become a political battleground. At the heart of the problem is not just the control over networks countries try to claim but also the technology and standards required to manage them and the bottleneck points along the way. If we can’t agree on the framework governing their use, we will fight over them just as we have done with other technologies for most of human history.

To prevent the Internet from becoming a theatre of war will require a shift in thinking away from state competition and toward peaceful collaboration. The first few pages of our Internet history have already been written and show plenty of examples of collaboration. The Internet’s future, however, will be written by the seismic geopolitical shifts that seem to discourage collaboration, while the multistakeholder model of Internet governance is increasingly becoming a smokescreen to misdirect and simultaneously placate the Internet community.

Today, the Internet faces a crisis equal in magnitude to the fights in the early 2000s when its disruptive nature was reordering market structures and shuttering traditional business models. Those crises, however, were defined — free culture as opposed to proprietary structures, innovation, and competition rather than termination monopolies. The current Internet crisis is far more complex; it defies definition and, thus, it is far greater. It is more dangerous because it is affected by the strain in democracies and the concessions made in democratic norms and institutions. If the world moves towards different forms of authoritarianism and centralized power, how can the Internet survive when, by design, it is based on decentralized and democratic forms of governance?

This question, along with governments' intentions to relinquish or assert more control, will define the future of the Internet over the next years.

Internet Freedom

The relationship between governments and the Internet has never been easy, oftentimes driven by contempt and other times by bizarre intimacy. There were two main factors precipitating this relationship: the first was the actual design of the Internet, which, because of its decentralized nature, could not be subjected to government control. Unless governments could find a way to compel the Internet to act in a certain way, its networks would remain independent and autonomous. The second was that, for the longest time, the Internet was seen as a beacon of economic growth and citizen empowerment. It was an extension of liberal democratic thinking and was celebrated for its ability to give freedom to users and democratize information. No one was willing to dispute it because no one was willing to dispute the liberal democratic order.

These two factors allowed freedom to become a core aspect of the way people understood and spoke of the Internet. And for the longest time, this messaging was orchestrated, perpetuated and supported by the United States, which made it part of its foreign policy as early as 2010. In fact, between 2009-2017, the United States invested over $120 million in “funding civil society organizations to promote fundamental freedoms online globally.” For the past two decades, the US worked hard on exposing governments and aggressively recruiting other countries to adopt a vision for the Internet that would provide legal and/or political cover for varying degrees of censorship and repression.

Things are changing fast, however. The rise of China as a notable global technology leader, the steady decline of democracies, and the US’s own domestic politics have made some governments question the soundness of Internet freedom, placing it under the microscope. At the same time, the Internet itself has changed drastically – it is more concentrated than ever before, it has become more about consumption than creativity and innovation, and new technologies like AI have diluted perceptions of what it stands for. The Internet is no longer seen as a land of opportunity but instead as a potential threat to the stability of states, a tool waiting to be used to spread misinformation, and a vessel that can cause chaos. These days, the intention is not to use the Internet for freedom; it is to weaponize it.

Honey Trap

Looking back at its history, the Internet has majorly evolved through private-led investment and academic research; the government’s role was to support its growth but not to intervene. The US government set this tone when it funded most of the Internet’s early development and then with its decision to commercialize it. After its commercialization, the US continued to exercise soft power over the Internet’s governance by promoting a bottom-up, private-led model to ensure a collaborative, inclusive, and development-oriented digital environment. The multistakeholder model was established as the only legitimate way to ensure global connectivity, democratize information, and achieve economic growth.

Therefore, when the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the United Nation’s oldest agency, instigated a global conversation about the information society in the early 2000s, the consensus was that the Internet would be better left alone than having the multilateral system control it. This vision, though contested by a small number of countries, managed to prevail due to the strength and persuasive power of the democratic alliance led by the US. As a result, the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS), the process that facilitated this global conversation, became the place for the international community to commit to building a people-centric, inclusive, and development-oriented information society. For the past twenty years, WSIS has been the compass of how the Internet community engages in Internet governance.

When it comes to WSIS, the West scored a major win. The US understood that global communication governance could only be effective if there was political, social, and economic buy-in – and all these three factors needed to happen in tandem, or the attempt to build a global governance framework would collapse. The economic conditions were present as the Internet was already predominantly run by private-owned networks. Socially, the World Wide Web revolutionized how users interacted with the Internet, and it proved to be a place of limitless opportunities. WSIS, therefore, was the opportunity to achieve the necessary political commitment and ensure the international community’s buy-in.

As with all UN processes, the WSIS documents were outcomes of compromise. The so-called Internet community achieved some significant wins but also suffered some losses. The recognition of civil society was one such win. Funding started pouring into supporting civil society organizations, especially from global majority countries, turning them into an indispensable part of the Internet governance machinery. Civil society became the catalyst for elevating human rights and ensuring Internet governance remains human-centric.

Another win was the consensus on the bottom-up, private-led model of the Internet. WSIS recognized that for the Internet to grow and scale, it was important to have a standards process that was open and market-driven. If that design had ensured economic growth in the US and Europe, it was inevitable that it would spread across the world. Or, so the thinking was.

In the end, this turned out to be a loss. The digital divide that existed then only got worse and still persists. In fact, according to data from the ITU, as of 2024, an estimated 2.6 billion people are offline. The inability of the developed world to bring along the countries of the global majority and ensure that they have the capacity and the tools to participate meaningfully in the advancement of the Internet has been the cause of legitimate friction. It has created a gap, which has been exploited and has allowed China and Russia to form relationships that have been translated into strong alliances.

Notwithstanding all this, the impact of WSIS continues to be significant. For Internet policy connoisseurs, WSIS constitutes a departure point on how to conduct international governance—not only would private actors, human rights activists, and engineers be able to sit at the same table as governments, but such participation would push the multilateral system to rethink its own modus operandi. Unlike what transpired during the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference, which saw deadly protests, WSIS was a celebration of the willingness of the multilateral system to evolve. And so, the multistakeholder model would remain unchanged for a long time. Democracies would continue to support it and push back at attempts by authoritarian states to challenge its relevance. Lately, though, the multistakeholder model is under duress, and the consensus built around it is crumbling. In the meantime, Russia’s and China’s vision is increasingly gaining traction.

Chinks in the armor

Even a modest tilting of the playing field could cripple the collaborative Internet governance framework. The multistakeholder model requires sustenance, which means the willingness of states to support a sizeable and replenishable pool of human rights advocates, civil society activists, Internet governance experts, donors, and journalists. It requires Western democracies to create strong alliances and come to the defense of multistakeholderism.

Consequently, the decision by the current US administration to dissolve the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and to freeze various foreign assistance programs imperils this sustenance. Halting foreign assistance will create a barrage of unintended consequences, many of which are already manifesting. Others will be harder to identify, at least in the short term. When it comes to the Internet, specifically, the entire edifice around Internet freedom is at risk. Ever since the US led the WSIS negotiations and masterfully guided its outcomes towards a more inclusive governance arrangement, Internet freedom has been associated with promoting inclusivity and openness; it has been associated with assisting civil society organizations around the world to advocate for human rights. The pause will cripple those civil society networks the United States helped build and foster. When a civil society organization is required to stop working for 90 days, its people will lose their jobs, expertise will be lost, and representation will cease to exist; programs defending Internet freedom will come to a grinding halt, and, in general, the role of civil society will be weakened.

A weakened civil society is bad news for the future of the open Internet. What is worse is a civil society co-opted by China and Russia. In fact, this is the strategy that both China and Russia are deploying to influence the global Internet governance discourse.

The human rights space is where China has been promoting an illiberal doctrine based on an uncompromising and arbitrary view of state sovereignty and non-interference. This is nothing new. It is China’s catechism, however, on human rights as primarily rights to development that has shifted the conversation. During the Global Digital Compact (GDC) process, a UN-driven multilateral effort to address issues of digital governance, China proclaimed to the appeasement of the developing world that the “right to development is the primary and basic human right.” As its official foreign policy narrative, this assertion gained China brownie points in the UN.

Borrowing from China’s playbook, Russia is adopting a similar strategy. Russia is not only engaging in ways it did not in the past, but it also tries to scope multistakeholder governance, aiming at having the multilateral system subvert the ability of non-state actors to participate. Historically, Russia’s position on Internet governance was defined by its disdain for anything that involved collaboration with civil society or other non-governmental actors. Not anymore. In its submission to the ITU working group on WSIS, a more engaging and mature Russian narrative has emerged:

One of the most important outcomes of the WSIS process is the establishment of a definition of Internet governance that includes multistakeholder participation. These stakeholders include governments, international intergovernmental organizations, private sector, technical community, and civil society […]. After 20 years of using the multistakeholder model, it can be concluded that there is a vital need for evolution and tuning of the model. […]. [This can be achieved through an] international legal framework concerning Internet governance. 

For Russia, strengthening the multistakeholder model means having a UN Internet Treaty. As the democratic alliance is crumbling, this strategy seems to be paying off, at least in the UN.

Back in 2017, the Russian delegation instigated and managed to pass a resolution for a UN Cybercrime Treaty, which became a reality late last year despite the significant objections raised by a swath of civil society organizations and digital security experts. Similarly, China’s role during the negotiations of the GDC was a masterclass in coordination, preparation, and shared vision. Using its influence over the G77+ group, China managed to advocate its own agenda for top-down, state-centric digital governance.

This shift points to one troubling conclusion: the terms that have historically defined Internet governance and ensured the broad participation of interested parties are at risk. This risk is further exacerbated by the new reality of “national globalism,” indicating that collaboration is no longer a feature of Internet governance but a bug.

Not business as usual

To reclaim what is being lost, business as usual is not going to work. The soft power the US has had is thinning out, leaving a significant leadership gap in Internet governance. The dependency on the US to carry the torch for Internet freedom is no longer shining bright and we should start considering how to pass it on to new alliances and new structures. After all, Internet freedom, multistakeholder governance, and human rights are not about one single country or one single agenda; they should not be confused with domestic politics.

What is required is immediate hard work and the willingness of all stakeholders to come together. Governments, private sector actors, and Internet institutions that still believe in democracy and seek to uphold the Internet’s values should step up. Governments should stop playing it safe and be willing to disrupt processes and hold accountable anyone who seeks to undermine or coopt the principles that have accompanied the Internet for more than two decades. Creating a cross-regional coalition is the only way to ensure sustainability and continuity for Internet freedom, support human rights and defend the multistakeholder model. Change is the only constant, and if the current environment teaches us anything, it is that creating single points of failure is not going to work. We need voices to lead us through uncertainty, and we need them now.

In this context, showing support for civil society and its work will be significant. Civil society has been an important agent of change for the Internet, something that has always threatened authoritarian regimes. Look at the way China has targeted organizations like Wikipedia and has fought against its inclusion in the UN space. We should expect that these examples will multiply and intensify, leading to a coordinated strategy to weaken civil society’s role. Civil society may be resilient, but it will require economic, political, and moral support.

All stakeholders must work together to rescue what is getting lost — the terms, the spaces, and the processes that have defined the Internet. Global inclusion, global collaboration, and meaningful participation will need to take priority. No one can do this alone, but collaboratively, the Internet can go back to being a tool that empowers people and facilitates social, political, and economic growth.

Conclusion

The next few years will be critical for the future of the Internet as authoritarians rise and use it to their advantage. Authoritarianism feeds division and, for the Internet, division is a kill switch.

There is a need, therefore, to have a serious conversation about how to reimagine what we mean by the open and global Internet, reclaim the benefits of its decentralized technology and create institutions that are accountable. To do that we need collaboration. There is no question that the choices we make today will determine the Internet we have tomorrow. Perhaps, by reclaiming the Internet, we may just be able to reclaim our democracies.