Earlier this month, a group of more than 30 prominent digital pioneers and engineers fired off a distress signal, warning that negotiations underway at the United Nations threatened something of a hostile takeover of the internet by governments seeking greater control over a technology that has transformed the world in a single generation.
The group, which includes Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, and Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, expressed concern about the pace of negotiations over a draft U.N. Global Compact, which aims to write the rules of the road for digital technology. The compact — being negotiated in U.N. talks led by Zambia and Sweden — is expected to be endorsed by world leaders at the Summit of the Future in late September.
“Some proposals for the Global Digital Compact (GDC) can be read to mandate more centralized governance,” the group wrote in an open letter to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres and his tech envoy, Amandeep Singh Gill. “We are concerned that the document will be largely a creation of governments, disconnected from the Internet and the Web as people all over the world currently experience them.”