 Hello. I'd like to welcome everyone to today's event, which is co-sponsored by New America's Open Technology Institute and Future Tense, which is a collaboration between Arizona State University, New America, and Slate Magazine, which examines emerging technologies. My name is Josh Keating. I'm a senior editor here at the empty offices of Slate Magazine. So today's event, you know, whether you call it the SplinterNet or the Balkanization of the Internet, what today's conversation about is the decline of an idea that's been with us from the earliest days of the Internet, of cyberspace as a kind of virtual realm that's removed from and outside the jurisdiction of terrestrial nation states. And obviously, you know, national governments have been chipping away at the idea for some time, but we seem to have reached a kind of inflection point of this transformation, especially with the recent confrontation between the U.S. and China over the apps WeChat and TikTok. So it's a great time to have this conversation, and I'll just briefly introduce the very distinguished panel we have to talk about these issues today. Ann Marie Slaughter is the CEO of New America. She's the former director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department under the Obama administration. She's the author of several books and most recently and pertinently to this conversation, The Chest Board and the Web, Strategies of Connection in a Network World. Rebecca McKinnon is the founding director of the Ranking Digital Rights Program at New America, which works to promote freedom of expression and privacy on the Internet. She's the co-founder of the Citizen Media Network Global Voices and the author of Consent of the Networked. And Madhulika Srikamar is an associate fellow and program coordinator with the Cyber Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi. And she was a 2019 India-U.S. fellow at New America, where she worked on India-U.S. data sharing and explored the underlying privacy standards. So Ann Marie, I'll start with you. I mean, the program notes for this conversation took note of a speech by Secretary Hillary Clinton in 2010, a very widely noticed speech where she talked about how the U.S. stands for a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And now at New America, obviously part of the mission of your organization is very tied to this idea of an open international Internet. And I was going to ask whether you still see that kind of open universal Internet as a goal worth fighting for in today's world? I do, in two words. So Josh, thanks for that. And I'm glad to be here. And this is a subject that New America cares deeply about, both the Open Technology Institute and the Ranking Digital Rights Project that Rebecca founded. But to your question, when I read the piece you published this summer for Future Tents, you start with that speech. And I was there, I was standing offstage when Secretary Clinton gave the speech at the museum. A number of us had been working on it for a couple of months. And it really was designed to be a real statement of U.S. Internet policy. It was based loosely on the four freedoms of Roosevelt's. And we talked about freedom from fear, freedom from want, but then the right to connect. So in addition to the foundation of traditional human rights, there was a right to connect. I do think we were naive in some ways. Inevitably, that was a decade ago. And we did not imagine all the ways in which the networked world could be manipulated and distorted, for sure. But I also still think the vision of an open and secure Internet, the way OTI would frame it is open, but also secure, secure in terms of rights for the individuals using it, including privacy and Rebecca can speak much more to that. But this is there's a deeper issue here. This is about what does the United States stand for in the world? It is not the Internet as a separate realm. It is not cyberspace as an area as you pointed out in your piece that is completely divorced from the world of sovereign states. Quite the contrary, my vision of U.S. foreign policy envisages an open world physically as well as virtually, not completely open, of course not. We can't, we can't just open all our borders and we need all sorts of protections, but that when in doubt, open is better than closed. When in doubt, you focus on people more than states, on the rights of people. And from that perspective, for all the ways that the Internet has enabled authoritarianism, it can and does also enable democracy. It enables people to communicate to others when they need to take to the streets, whether that's in the United States or in other countries. It allows us to tell people in other countries what is happening to us. It allows us to to have actually what in Islam it would be called the umma, right, the sense of a brotherhood or sisterhood of humanity. Those are lofty concepts, but the United States has always stood for, at least verbally, we have stood for this vision of universal human rights and the ability of people beyond any country to enjoy basic rights and freedoms. So I still think that's worth pushing in the Internet. Thanks, and Rebecca did just sort of take that vision and get a little more practical and nitty gritty with it. You know, you wrote a great recent piece for Slate on the steps that need to be taken to preserve an open Internet. And I was wondering if you could sort of summarize some of those ideas now. I mean, what are the in terms of policies? So what should be the agenda right now? Sure. And I was at that speech too and Anne Marie moderated a panel right afterwards and and and it sort of relates to some of my concerns at the time. And concerns now and in the piece I wrote for Slate, I kind of started by critiquing current administration's approach to Internet policy, which is sort of making a show of taking action to in the name of security being tough on China, but but not actually making us more secure and also mirroring the the Internet policies based on national sovereignty that that the Chinese government has advocated and and propagated around the world. And so, you know, what what I called for also builds on, I think, some of the some of the things that weren't addressed by the previous administration and its Internet freedom policy. And what I was concerned about kind of 10 years ago really was that we were calling for a free and open Internet which which we need, but there was not enough accountability and human rights protection being built in that that there was too much of an assumption that as long as everybody can connect to Facebook and Google, democracy will will follow without holding Facebook and Google and any company, whether it's TikTok or or who, accountable for protecting the rights of users and having the right regulation in place to ensure that that that people are protected and respected and that there be coordination across borders about accountability, but that also national governments of many democracies were taking short-term actions to to secure interests and and and rights, you know, to address short-term security or economic problems, whether it's terrorism online or copyright violation that were actually going to contribute to a more vulcanized Internet in the long run and a less secure Internet for individuals as far as their rights were concerned. And and we've gotten to a point, you know, so putting the current administration aside for a moment and and the critiques that I think we're seeing in lots of places, putting that aside for a moment, there is a breakdown in trust and there is also a failure of leadership and vision on the part of the United States to really articulate what is the alternative to a sovereignty-based Internet in which governments say, okay, I represent the interests of my people and so therefore I'm going to block various apps or do whatever it takes to secure the Internet within my borders and then enforce my own laws, how I see fit, which unless you have a perfect human rights record, which is no government, but some governments much worse than others, results in that government being able to abuse its power potentially through privately owned and operated networks to reinforce its its power and sovereignty and and so that that is the danger and also the potential of different governments to abuse their power against other citizens of other countries, right? So so we've seen the European Union, actually, you know, there's been a court ruling in the European Union that has basically invalidated the agreement that enables U.S. companies to trans to process European data due to concerns of lack of accountability by our surveillance authority and and so there's lack of trust on all sides and we really need a, you know, take away the names of countries, take away the names of companies. We need a universal set of standards for how people's rights need to be protected on the Internet and the standards that companies need to be held to and governments need to be held to if if the Internet, if our ability to use the Internet is going to be to actually reinforce our rights, enable our rights to be exercised and protected rather than just reinforcing the power of whoever won the last election at the right time when the networks kind of started to kick in and and and so and that's why, you know, in my piece and elsewhere and I've seen these calls not just coming from me but from other people, we really need, you know, if there is another administration, we need the U.S. to step up and work with its allies, to work with governments that are committed to human rights and committed to improving their own human rights record and practices to really step up and articulate, you know, here are the types of regulations we need to protect people and and here here's how we ourselves are going to be held accountable and holding each other accountable to ensure that that the Internet actually serves people and and that this in in turn is an alternative vision for what the Internet is and that's a better argument for why people shouldn't use WeChat than it's Chinese, right, that it represents a vision. If you use the technologies run by companies that are part of an Internet governance system that is human rights supporting, that will be good for you and your family and and your community in the long term as opposed to choosing technologies that that are just going to reinforce the power of the incumbent. So that needs to be articulated. It needs to be articulated at an international level amongst a number of governments with civil society and companies participating and companies also recognizing that they they have to be held accountable themselves to protecting and respecting users' rights and and just kind of saying, okay, we have a free and open Internet so that everybody from Kenya to to Cambodia can can use Facebook is not enough to have a world in which human rights can be exercised and protected. I know that there's been a really kind of active and vigorous debate on these topics in India as well, whether it's the, you know, the data protection bill or or the Indian ban on Chinese apps, which actually came a few weeks before Trump started talking about TikTok. Kirsten, from your perspective, how's the kind of official view on on on on a global Internet evolved in India in recent years? I think you're still muted. I'm just gonna unmute myself. A quick clarification. So I'm no longer with Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi. It's been a year. I mean, I'm sure they'd be happy to have me or so I like to believe but I have kind of since just completed my graduate program at Harvard Law. So I'm just waiting till I kind of jump into my next role. But to answer your question, and I think the best way to describe what's happening in India right now, and some scholars have called it this, that it's a two horse race, right? There's a dominance of US companies and a dominance of Chinese companies. And India is a perfect kind of case study to kind of understand why or how these competing models of governance neither hold true for democratic societies. And just to kind of run through what exactly happened over the past few months. So the first kind of instance, of course, in July was TikTok being banned literally overnight. So this was in response to the offline confrontation between the Indian and Chinese forces which left many Indian soldiers dead and a no number of Chinese casualties. So in response to that, the Indian government banned 60 Chinese mobile apps, TikTok being one of them. And this is of course, I think one of the things that we can unpack through this conversation. The other kind of development over the past few months has been the Wall Street Journal's revelations the past month. So essentially, it was revealed that Facebook allowed a politician from India's ruling party to remain on its platform, even though his anti-Muslim kind of post flouted Facebook's hate speech rules. But the post was not removed and there were allegations from current and former Facebook employees that the Facebook public policy directors relationship with the current ruling party kind of had something to do with Facebook not bringing down a post. Since then, since the revelations, the posting question has been brought down. So these are kind of two interesting developments that happened over the past few months, which kind of illustrate that neither of these models are tenable for Indian users. So just to kind of quickly go through some stats, just to understand the dominance of these companies in the country. So TikTok came into the market in 2018, but India until it was banned was a third, I mean, had a third of TikTok's users and essentially a third of all Indian smartphone users were on TikTok. So essentially, Indian users are the largest kind of user base for TikTok. And the same holds true for Facebook as well. So there are 270 million Facebook users and of course, all of this nuggets of trivia you'd find if India's Facebook audience were a country, then it'd be the fourth largest country in the world. So that kind of really drives home the point which I brought up earlier, which is that it's two hostries. And essentially what we saw with the Indian government in responding to both of these models is kind of reasserting their sovereignty over the cyberspace. So with the Facebook instance, we can see that there has been a breakdown of incentives that it was given the kind of pressure that the company is currently under in India, since they have been called in to localize their data, which is essentially the idea that you store and process all your data through Indian servers. And in some cases, you don't transfer the data abroad. Given the pressure, this specific pressure that the company was under, that that inherently affected its judgment on across content as well. So here, we're seeing a dominance of companies across content, social media news and payments with WhatsApp payments and Google payments that increasingly the regulatory pressures are kind of preventing, are not essentially allowing companies to respond the same they would in the US. So what that reality has inherently lent itself to is that neither of these models are agreeable to the government. If you go to the daily corridors, you're never going to hear this. And I think what could potentially be the way, I mean, it's not the way forward, but what the trend that's kind of been coming up is Chinese or American tech companies investing in Indian tech companies. And that seems to be the next frontier of how potentially companies might want to deal with regulatory arbitrage. So again, at the span of last few months, Facebook made the largest investment in India's largest telecom player called Geo. So, I mean, Facebook invested $5.7 billion for a 9.99% state. So that's something to watch out for as well. I think that responds to, you know, given it responds to two realities, right? The first one being that the Indian government is and has shown willingness to go after, you know, American companies and Chinese companies. So they essentially see a local partnership as a way forward. And the second reality is that this could board well for Indian users from an economic front. There's local output being created. There's more to be taxed, which has always been a concern for the Indian government. But it's unclear how it's going to board for human rights and for the redressal rights of Indian users. And we haven't seen that play out yet. So I'd be kind of, I mean, I'm not sure I'm really kind of helping this conversation. I'm muddying it if anything, adding a new piece of information, if you will. But this could be something that we're going to see a lot of as well. That kind of curry favor with, you know, Southern governments, and with the growth potential in several markets, that we're going to see a lot of this happening. And it's worth exploring. Thanks, Lamar. I apologize for misidentifying you and congratulations. Graduating law school. I want to remind viewers that you can ask questions to our panelists by dropping them in the Q&A tab at the bottom of the screen. Henry, I'm curious, you know, looking at the the TikTok affair in particular, I mean, what do you see as the kind of lasting impact of this on, you know, U.S. credibility when it comes to talking about issues regarding the open Internet and open access? Well, the current administration does not believe in an open Internet or open access. So there's no hypocrisy from its point of view. It believes in digital sovereignty. It accepts the Chinese vision. And the quite the initial question was, you know, is there an alternative vision that citizens anyway should be promoting? And I would add Europeans, Indians, Tamadus point, the world would be a better place if there were more competition on the company side. And if companies were in fact competing on the basis of respecting digital rights, exactly the ranking digital rights project, where they are saying, we are more accountable, we preserve your data, we do not, here are our hate speech policies. So I actually think that when we talk about openness, we also want open competition. And I should have clarified, I totally agree with Rebecca's point that open should come with, I would look at the open government partnership principles of being transparent, being participatory, inclusive and accountable. And then fleshing that out. And it is vital that we do not have a world in which states are locking down their Internet. But companies are also engaging in, in Madu, when I hear you, all I can think of is sort of digital colonization, right? That is not a way that we want to go. So the alternative vision that if there were a Biden-Harris administration that I think we would be pushing for would be to work with a number of other countries, including Europe, who's way ahead of us, although maybe that's not necessarily the optimal American vision of what an open Internet, open and secure and accountable Internet should be. But it's better than what we've got now, working together with other governments to adopt what are global norms and then insisting that companies abide by those norms, because they are not just platforms. They are publishers and they wield enormous political power and they wield enormous responsibility precisely for the polarization and decline of trust that we are seeing. And Rebecca, when we talk about the kind of nationalization of the Internet, that can mean everything from data storage laws, to censorship, to the GDPR, to recent Internet shutdowns like we've seen in Belarus and other places. I mean, from your perspective, which of these is kind of the one that's or the one that's most serious or a, you know, when we talk about the splitting of the Internet, which do you see as the kind of biggest long-term threat? Yeah, well, it's really hard to, you know, pull, you know, these are all very intertwined and it's very hard to kind of pull out one thread. But what it all boils down to in the end is power. And do you hold power, how do you hold power accountable, whether it's the power of a company to decide what you can and cannot do on a platform, what you can and cannot see, what's prioritized for you to see, who is targeting you with content on that platform? Those are all forms of power, as is government power to monitor, surveil, and also exercise power to regulate companies. So how do we make sure that all these different forms of power exercised through digital platforms and networks are held accountable and are supporting human rights? And, you know, we need to, when we're thinking about freedom and openness, right? Well, we're not talking about a state of nature, right? State of nature is not compatible with human rights. It doesn't mean free for all. You can do anything you want, you know, you can go anywhere and do anything you want. In such a state of nature, probably the free women here wouldn't be present, right? You know, there's, this is not, you know, internet freedom or even free speech for that matter is not about just anybody can do anything they want, because if that's the case, then whoever has the most money can pay to target others with speech, while those with no money are just subject to whatever rules are put in place. So we need to think about how you hold power accountable in the internet age, how you enable global networks, you enable activists across borders to organize and mobilize for all kinds of different causes, whether it's climate, whether whether it's anti-corruption, whether whatever it is, right? You need that. But the problem is our institutions for holding power accountable are still from the analog age. We have not upgraded them. And that's what I talked about in my book, you know, back in, that came out in 2012. The good news is, is that I think in 2012, not many people were sort of really recognizing how much hard work needs to be done to figure out how you hold power accountable in the internet age, so that individuals can wield it and that violations of rights are both can be known. And you know, who's done and committed them, and you can hold them accountable. We're and we're quite far from that right now. But we're at a point in history where we're kind of governance. And this is, you know, and Maria is a scholar, I can talk a lot about that. We're sort of a lot of governance and accountability mechanisms need to be rethought. But it's also an age old issue, right? The issue is, if you're going to be an open society that protects human rights, how do you do that and also protect people from real security threats? How do you organize law enforcement? How do you organize national security and, you know, track down bad guys who kill people while not using the apparatus of security to violate rights and holding accountable, sufficiently holding accountable those with the, with that power, so that they cannot get away with that. And, and again, we're still pretty far from figuring that out. But I do want to mention one thing about TikTok, and then I'd love to hear Madhu's perspective on this as well. You know, one of the interesting things about this TikTok deal that, you know, kind of, if it goes through, we'll go to to cronies of the current occupant of the White House. And, you know, Oracle, which is the primary company that would house the new entities' data and manage it, it's primary, you know, one of its major sources of business is not managing a social network, but it's on tracking and profiling and collecting data on people and selling it to ad tech networks. And so, so actually, if you combine that capability with TikTok's algorithm and, you know, policy preferences by people who might be influenced by an administration who thinks that content moderation shouldn't happen and has issued executive orders, essentially, to that effect, then you have a really great targeted misinformation in HPEACH vehicle in the hands of people who are allied to a particular party that happens to be in power. You know, I'm describing a hypothetical scenario. It hasn't happened that way, and it may not, but there's nothing in our law currently that prevents that from happening. And so, you know, that is, you know, putting aside what the real threat is coming from China or elsewhere, that's a security threat to our democracy that Congress can address and must. Thanks, Rebecca. Madhu, the kind of most best-known or most discussed example of, again, national internet is China's great firewall. And I'm wondering, from your perspective, you know, how influential is that model when other governments are sort of tempted to move into in that direction? Is China the model that they're following? Have they kind of set the standard for this, you know, more closed nationalistic vision of the internet? Sure. And kind of before getting into this, I just want to quickly respond to what we've been discussing. The idea of alternate vision sounds like the way to go, right? I feel like we haven't really settled on the idea of open internet yet. I mean, we have that ideal of an open internet, but we haven't necessarily seen it in action maybe in the past decade. So the question really becomes what should the alternate vision look like? And what's increasingly becoming clear is that it has to be a vision that allows for local competitiveness, right? I think you would allow, I mean, you would hope that companies can be divorced from the states they come from and the interests that they may or may not represent. But I think that ship has sailed at this point. I think in India's kind of public psyche, there is a very wide recognition that these are Chinese companies, these are American companies, and India has a reason to kind of carve out their own path. So what was earlier potentially a recognition you would have heard in some Delhi circles, you know, policy circles just the same, you know, 10 people kind of talking about these issues, that's no longer the case. Given the TikTok ban, you know, how it occupy primetime news in India, I think there's a wider recognition and across the public mandate as well. So essentially, the question then becomes how do you bring about this local competitiveness? And I think that's a tricky question. I love Rebecca's suggestions that she put down in her piece that, you know, you need to increase mutual trust. You need to bring up, you know, regulation to kind of go after the data collection and practices of tech companies. And I think the third kind of prong to that is how do you, you know, kind of encourage local competitiveness, be it in Europe or be it in India. And I think that's a tricky portion. And I'm not sure how exactly we're going to respond to that. Some Indian ministers have kind of toyed with this idea of having, you know, open protocols, you know, having systems without any gatekeepers that allows anyone to be a player, essentially, the open internet that we all envision to begin with. And if that vision were to materialize, I think there's something there. But I think, you know, if you step back from that open internet as is, I don't think really holds much. I mean, I don't really see that being the way forward, necessarily. And kind of the second, you know, in addition to the same argument is that tech companies have increasingly recognized that they can't necessarily forward this idea of open internet anymore in your daily either. So you see with WhatsApp, they have agreed to localize their payments data. You see with Google, they've agreed to kind of localize their payments data. So it's essentially a mandate which came from the Reserve Bank of India, which is a financial nodal agency, that they have to store and process financial data to be able to operate in the market. And WhatsApp's first market for the payment services was India and as is Google if I'm not wrong. So the stakes are invariably higher at the stage when services are being launched in this country that they're willing to kind of a see to some of the, you know, mandate, you know, the city governments kind of demands which they wouldn't have, let's say even a couple of years ago. So I think this kind of increasing realization that their companies are not necessarily holding the front for the open internet, not in your daily at least. And this realization, which I think I can be challenged on that wider realization that, you know, Indian citizens think it's okay for an Indian model to come up. So the question really becomes a kind of responding to, and I think some of this responds to your question that, you know, as we met, you know, we heard already, the Indian government Prime Minister Narendra Modi is, I'm sure, fascinated with the Chinese vision as much as the current administration here in the US. So I think for folks who want to kind of put forward this idea of open internet, the real work that has to be done is kind of figuring out how do we create these open systems. And I'm not sure we're dedicating as much resources to that conversation. But I think that's the way to go finding, you know, open protocols or APIs, you know, some way to kind of divorce the content from the gatekeepers. Can I just respond, Josh? I mean, I think we're thinking about local competition anywhere. Part of the problem is there isn't a positive alternative that is free, right? And so you've got the business model is at the heart of this means it's free because, if you've just seen the social dilemma or read any of this, we, the users are actually the product, right? We are in surveillance capitalism. But, and there are people, of course, working on designing civic health into platforms. Eli Pariser has a program, a lot of people have thought about that. But, and you can imagine a subscription service that says, yes, if you don't want your data to be used this way, if you want your company to actually be accountable in all these ways, here it is. But nobody has a way of doing that for free. So then you've got something that you have to pay for, again, something that is for free, which is just like the publishing world, you know, the things behind a paywall have a small, much smaller user base or customer base. And that, so when we, I do think part of the answer has to be that you design much more positive trust building accountable elements into the very software. But then for them to compete, you're going to have to also make it much harder to do, to work with the current business model of essentially luring users in, giving them free product and then profiting from them. That may or may not have been the question you were asking, but Madhu prompted it. No, my next question actually kind of follows up on that. I mean, I think that sometimes some of the pushback you hear towards, I guess you could call traditional American rhetoric on the open internet is that it's really just this sort of pretext that Americans use to promote their own interests, whether it's, you know, facilitating surveillance by the US government or, you know, opening markets to, you know, the big American tech companies. I guess my question, and I guess I'll address it to Rebecca first, but anyone who wants to answer can. You know, in order for, you know, to have a truly open internet, does the internet also have to become somewhat less American? Makes sense. Well, yeah, absolutely. I think that if the onus is on us to prove the skeptics wrong and to show that we're willing to be held accountable. And so far, we've not done enough to build trust that we've not done enough to demonstrate that we're holding our own government agencies accountable or companies accountable. And so we need to do a lot of work if anybody has, if we think anybody has any any reason to listen to anything we say. One thing Ann Marie sort of gave me an excuse to promote the work of my colleagues at Ranking Digital Rights. If you go to rankingdigitalright.org click on the widget that says it's the business model. My colleagues produced a couple of reports earlier this year just talking about the problems related to human rights and the regulatory challenges related to the targeted advertising business model that fuels the internet giants. And that that that indeed I agree, we need more competition. They should not be so dominant. There needs to be alternatives. But there are also some policy suggestions in there targeted at the U.S. But some in other countries are finding them useful. But U.S., you know, these companies are headquartered in the United States. We've got to step up and take responsibility for what we have created and do the work to show that the platforms that that that originate here, that we have the ability to regulate can be held accountable for respecting users human rights. Do you want to respond to that or I mean, I would love to hear from both of you about I mean, I guess we don't know enough yet. But this idea of, you know, U.S. companies partnering with local companies, right? I mean, I haven't really come out on either side of this. I think it's fairly complicated because we don't know how it's going to operationalize. But yeah, I'm curious to hear whether you would necessarily see that as furthering the balkanization of the internet or maybe is that a good outcome even that, you know, that helps with the local competitiveness piece that we were discussing? I would start by referencing something I think both Josh and Rebecca have written about, which is to say that we now have to start from a degree of balkanized internet, right? In other words, we can't, we're not where we were 20 years ago. China has its firewall, but you know, European countries, we're talking about digital sovereignty five years ago, right? Germany had a very strong idea in part to protect against American companies. And as you say, India has its own view. So I actually think you have to accept that right now you're not going to have a completely open internet. The question is, can you have a more open internet that is rights regarding and that part of rights regarding of all human beings, both nationally and globally? And there you could imagine allowing partnerships if those partnerships met certain standards and those standards would then have to be enshrined in both national and I would hope international law. Again, we do not have a set of, we have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we have human rights treaties, and a lot of people including ranking digital rights have been translating those rights, but nations into the digital world, but nations haven't embraced those translations as much as they have. But I can imagine those partnerships as a way of really helping build local competition, but then you have to have antitrust laws and privacy laws and surveillance regulation built in. Otherwise, what you're getting is a geopolitical conflict between Chinese companies and American companies. And as I said, we've seen that movie before, it's called colonization. So obviously we're sitting here looking at each other in tiny boxes on Zoom instead of on a stage in Washington and the pandemic has moved so much human activity online, not just organizations like New American Slate, but the upcoming G20 conference and the recent General Assembly. Given the shift to online that we've seen during this pandemic, what kind of lasting impact do you see that having on internet governance and the way that governments behave as actors on the internet? That one's for anybody who wants to answer it. I'll jump in. I mean, it just makes it all the more urgent to ensure that everyone has access to the internet for starters, or you can't even go to school these days, or and that the internet is designed and regulated and governed in a manner that is inclusive, that respects the rights of people, regardless of whether they're able to pay for advertising, regardless of where they come from or what their religion is. And that we have an internet that does enable everyone to be respected and protected. It makes it all the more urgent, just speaking to Madhu's thought. I think it partnerships between US and Indian companies, I guess it's sort of up to the Indian people and Indian civil society to hold those new entities accountable. And we've all got to step up and hold everyone who's exercising digital power over us accountable. And it also become more active in building alternatives, which is something that everybody here is also involved with. We've got a couple of questions from the audience about multilateralism. Oh, and by the way, you can still ask questions at the bottom of your screen. Liesl Brunner asks, if something like the EU's code of practice on disinformation could be a model of what governments can do to seek greater accountability. Sam Gautam asks, what role would the UN play in developing a universal standard for the internet? So I guess just as a sort of general question, what kind of multilateral frameworks do you think are most useful when sort of developing universal standards for these questions? I can jump in on the second one. I think the first, the European one's probably for Rebecca or Madhu. But the United Nations has been trying to first of all articulate a concept of digital cooperation that issued a declaration of interdependence. It was chaired by Jack Ma and Melissa Gates, Melinda Gates, so looking globally in terms of what a world in which we cooperated digitally would look like and what guidelines and rules would have to be in place. And there are other efforts. There's also, of course, civil society efforts. I'm on the Board of the Cyber Peace Institute, which is trying to support those kinds of norms. But I will say that digital multilateralism is only as strong as real or physical multilateralism. The current US government has absolute disdain for international institutions. So the United Nations cannot possibly put out something that is going to hold with one of its most powerful members flouting it. And of course, that gives every other government who has no interest in those rules plenty of wake to say, yep, we're just following the United States or not to say anything at all, but not to support it. So I can imagine a UN role, but it has to be a UN role supported by a number of very strong member states. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, the UN role is tricky in that, you know, the UN Human Rights Council, for example, you know, had a resolution that was also approved by the General Assembly affirming that human rights extend online. And that was really critical. And you have special rapporteurs and kind of the human the human rights system within the UN has been doing a lot of work around also business and human rights and holding tech companies accountable and what should those mechanisms be. On the other hand, there was a fight in the last decade over who sets standards, who sets the technical standards for the internet. And the human rights community was very much against that function being held by the United Nations, because that would exclude the technical community and civil society from participating. And it would just be up to, you know, majority of vote amongst governments, many of which do not respect human rights of their people to determine what the standards were. And so for some functions, you actually want a much more multi stakeholder process that, you know, maybe the UN relate is involved with, but is not just the government's coming together. So it's tricky with the UN. But I completely agree, if you don't engage, then you're not even in the game. Just to quickly add, I think another player that I mean, folks are tracking. I know the Indian government is really invested in is the World Trade Organization. Specifically on the question now we're seeing with TikTok, this idea of national security exceptions for non engaging with foreign companies, I think that's going to become a tricky space. And I'd be interesting to find out if WTO kind of steps in as a watchdog. And we kind of, and whether we won that. So I think that's going to be the next step of maybe the engagement on this issue. And just going back to what Rebecca mentioned, the technical standard setting organizations and the engagement that came from a lot of, you know, Southern civil societies and governments was a call for open internet and a multi stakeholder internet. So if you look at the Indian government submissions back then, there was a clear kind of recognition of why we wanted internet governance to be multi stakeholder. But if you look at the Indian government submissions now to the UN open ended working group, you can see that it's day and night. Now it's about data ownership. And it's about, you know, how do you generate value or extract value from data? So I think we're stepping into a tricky period, right? The same multilateral organizations responding to these questions now, kind of responding to governments who are more antagonistic about some of these, which is kind of diametrically opposite to what we saw the past decade when it came to, you know, open internet. We have a wonderfully written question from Megan Byrne about what the actual threat is that we're worried about from Tik Tok. Are we really worried that an app that thinks I'm a cottage core witch and serves up content of people in chicken soups, playing the drums as an imminent threat? I guess, you know, I think what she's saying is, you know, we've talked a lot about the Trump administration's response to Tik Tok as an overreaction and its sort of impact on the global internet. But, you know, are there reasons for concern about Tik Tok and some of these other apps we're talking about? I mean, is there sort of like a kernel of truth to the worries here? Well, if I could talk about it for a minute, you know, with Tik Tok specifically, and I talked about this a little bit before, you know, there is an algorithm that recommends content. And so it could be used to spread disinformation, or it could help someone spread disinformation across Tik Tok in a way that could be politically material, or otherwise material. So there's that. You know, I agree kind of the ability to track what Tik Tok teams are doing on Tik Tok. I'd be more worried about, you know, other Chinese companies like Huawei and kind of their positioning within networks before for Tik Tok in that. But, you know, that said, you know, WeChat is one of the other apps that was targeted by the administration. I won't put that on my phone because I used to work in China. I used to work in Hong Kong. I work on human rights issues. I don't want WeChat anywhere close to my contact, right? My network of content. But that's my personal security threat. I do agree with the court decision blocking the Trump administration's executive order to block WeChat and Tik Tok on First Amendment grounds. It was overbroad that, you know, there are lots of people on these networks who depend on them to communicate and to exercise their right to expression that are unrelated to these security threats that are ostensibly the reasons for the block. So, you know, again, yes, it's not that there's zero security issues. And it's not that, say, European government might feel that Facebook has zero security issues in regarding, you know, our government's access to Facebook data. But not to say that that's entirely equivalent. But again, there are issues. That need to be addressed. The question is how you go about addressing them in a way that really protects people. I would also add that we have multiple ways of fighting these algorithms. And one of them is greatly enhanced digital literacy, right? If you understand that these algorithms are essentially encouraging your worst self, that they are, whatever you like, they're going to push that into an extremely, increasingly extreme direction. A, you may click on fewer of them. You'll understand that you are not actually seeing a representative section of what others are seeing. So part of what we have to do to push back is really to get people to understand what, you know, things like deep fakes, sort of the origins of a lot of what we consume, and how the algorithms radically skew our perception of reality. And just to quickly add, there were instances that were reported about shadow banning on TikTok, which is mirrors what Rebecca just mentioned right now. Essentially, content propagating in Hindu-Muslim unity that were circulated on TikTok. Essentially, a lot of that kind of vanished from the page. I think the feed it's called. I'm not on TikTok, as you can see. But so there were cases of shadow banning. And that's, I think, been one of the civil society concerns as well, that there have been reported instances of TikTok and of censoring content on the platform. Helen Belgrave asked a question, which I think probably for Anne-Marie, but given that foreign policy and internet policy are inextricably linked, does that mean that internet splintering, internet splintering, it's hard to say, is just inevitable based on current geopolitics? Based on current geopolitics, as in right now, and if the Trump administration were reelected, yes. The strongest voice against it might be the European Union. But the European Union is not in a strong foreign policy place right now. I wish they were. I wish they were in far stronger position. But yes, I mean, you are, for one thing, as the whole discussion of TikTok and WeChat reflect, this is Trump against China much more than it is actually looking at the harms to Megan's question of being done to individuals. And so for one thing, the internet just becomes another weapon. You push back against an adversary by striking at their companies on the internet just as you put sanctions on importers and exporters. So yes, I think right now, every time you hear, we're back in an age of great power competition, which you do also hear from Democrats as well as Republicans with a certain amount of, well, at least we understand how this game is played, then that is not a force for the kind of internet we are talking about. If you have a US government working with a number of other countries around the world, not just in Europe, but in Asia, it'd be interesting to see an Indian, some Indian government probably would play here that says, look, we've got a value based foreign policy. We think that our power lies in the end in the strength of our values, which means we have to live them at home, as well as abroad, which is why we have so much deep work to do at home. You can then imagine saying, you know, our values as I started say there's a there universal human rights, all human beings are created equal or entitled to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. What does that look like online? And you then push that vision. But it requires a powerful country working with lots of other countries to push that vision. Civil society can play a really important role, companies can play a role, but you can't do it alone. Yeah, that's a good transition to a point that Michelle Ashkar makes, which I think will be a good note to end on. You know, we're always addressing governments and companies in this discussion, but there's a third player here, people. So, you know, as users of the internet, what are our responsibilities and what are things that we can do to promote a kind of open more international internet that we'd all like to see? And it'd be great if all three of you could answer this one and then we'll wrap up. You want to start, Madhu? Sure. So, what I have been thinking about is people kind of pushing for more transparency from governments when it comes to the kind of information controls that they employ to ban an app like TikTok. So the same information controls you use to shut down the internet, right? So I think that's going to be a space that we should kind of watch out for and kind of push for more information, policy, rational statistics from governments. Yeah, if I could just follow on that, we have to be citizens of the internet, not just users of the internet, right? We have to, just as, you know, I'm here on my balcony in DC, you know, you could be in any given city. If I want this city to be run in a way that protects my interests and respects my rights, I have to engage. I have to vote. You know, I have to exercise whatever levers of power as a consumer, you know, etc. as I can. And similarly, I think in the early days, people kind of just assume the internet just kind of is the way it is. The internet will only serve human rights and it will only serve the kind of society that we want to have if everybody takes responsibility. If every employee in these tech companies, every executive in these tech companies takes responsibility for that vision. Every government official who has any power over how the internet is regulated and every person who uses the internet, we can make choices. We can also, you know, civil society has a huge role to play, but also just as citizens in terms of how we use the internet, what tools we choose to use, how we vote actually does make a difference as well. I mean, we're talking a lot. I think it's sort of a revival of the understanding that governments, the next step in this story, depends on governments and depends on which governments are empowered to represent what ideas we got about edit matters for all kinds of reasons in all of our countries. So I know we're at time. I will add two sentences. Yes, we have to vote. We have to think about this as government policy like anything else, but we also have to hold the companies accountable. And again, ranking digital rights is one way of doing that. But we're in an age where everyone's asking, do you know where your food comes from? Do you know what practices this company engages in with regard to child labor? It's an era of transparency where you have to be a conscious consumer. We can also be conscious consumers of our internet services in all those different ways by finding out, does this company respect rights? And we have a way to do so. And that then sends a message to companies that consumers care. Great. Well, I want to thank Madhu, Rebecca, and Anne-Marie so much for sharing their time and their insights with us today and also OTI and Future Tense for sponsoring this conversation. Just an announcement next week on October 7th. Future Tense is going to be hosting an event on the use of Twitter by diplomats, and that will feature the Mexican ambassador to the U.S., Martha Barsena, and the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Christopher Landau. So that should be another really interesting conversation. So thank you to all and to everyone who tuned in. And have a great rest of the day.