A group of technical experts involved in the development and maintenance of the Internet and the Web, including CDT CTO Mallory Knodel, published an open letter today. The letter calls on the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General and the Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology to "uphold the bottom-up, collaborative and inclusive model of Internet governance that has served the world for the past half century" as part of the upcoming Global Digital Compact (GDC).

The letter emphasizes that "the Internet is an unusual technology because it is fundamentally distributed. It is built up from all of the participating networks. Each network participates for its own reasons according to its own needs and priorities. And this means, necessarily, that there is no center of control on the Internet. This feature is an essential property of the Internet, and not an accident."

The authors express concern over recent trends toward a hierarchical model of governance over technical matters: "Yet over the past few years we have noticed a willingness to address issues on the Internet and Web by attempting to insert a hierarchical model of governance over technical matters. Such proposals concern us because they represent an erosion of the basic architecture."

Specifically addressing some proposals for the GDC, they state: "In particular, some proposals for the Global Digital Compact (GDC) can be read to mandate more centralized governance. If the final document contains such language, we believe it will be detrimental to not only the Internet and the Web but also to the world’s economies and societies."

The letter further notes concerns about limited participation from non-government stakeholders in developing the GDC: "We note that the GDC is being developed in a multilateral process between states, with very limited application of open, inclusive and consensus-driven methods by which the Internet and Web have been developed to date. Beyond some high-level consultations, non-government stakeholders (including Internet technical standards bodies and the broader technical community) have had only weak ways to participate in the GDC process."

The authors urge member states, along with UN leadership, to ensure digital governance proposals remain consistent with established multistakeholder practices: "Therefore, we ask that member states, the Secretary-General and Tech Envoy seek to ensure that proposals for digital governance remain consistent with enormously successful multistakeholder Internet governance practice that has brought us the Internet of today. Government engagement in digital and Internet governance is needed to deal with many abuses of this global system but it is our common responsibility to uphold bottom-up, collaborative and inclusive model of Internet governance that has served world for past half century."

Read full letter + list signatories.