Essays Explore Governance and Geoeconomics of Digital Technologies

In November 2021, CIGI joined King’s College London (KCL) in hosting a virtual conference as part of KCL’s Project for Peaceful Competition. An intellectually and geographically diverse group of experts met to discuss the geoeconomics of new digital technologies and the prospects for their governance in a multi-polar world.

This essay series includes the papers from the conference and videos of opening and closing sessions. An introduction summarizes the principal analytical conclusions emerging from the conference, along with the main policy recommendations put forward by participants.

If financial support for the “freedom convoy” surprised politicians and law enforcement, it was because they often focus on speech without considering other elements of the online ecosystem. In her latest CIGI opinion, which first appeared in the Toronto Star, Heidi Tworek asks: How might the situation have played out differently, if policy makers had paid attention to and better regulated those funding ecosystems earlier? 

Democracy is under threat around the world from authoritarian nationalist and populist movements, and Canada is not a democratic island insulated from these global trends. The terrible message of the “freedom convoy” is that Canadian democracy will increasingly need defending both on the ground and in the digital domain. In this piece, first published on TVO.org, Wesley Wark writes that we can start by rethinking our approach to the definition and protection of the infrastructure critical to civil society.

In this opinion, Branke Marijan writes that both Russia and the United States have prevented progress on new international norms and agreements on the development and use of autonomous systems. This latest crisis should be seen as an opportunity to resolve long-standing challenges to the extent possible and, crucially, to put new agreements in place to avoid future confrontations.

Blayne Haggart argues that thinking about how an autocratic United States might affect internet and platform governance is a useful exercise. The question forces us to work through our assumptions about how power and authority work in internet governance, especially as regards the relationship between states and businesses. Following these assumptions to their logical conclusions can take us to some interesting places.