Project Liberty’s McCourt Institute offers consultation in response to the call for inputs from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on “The relationship between human rights and technical standard-setting processes for new and emerging digital technologies (2023)” submitted on March 3rd, 2023. The purpose is to inform the report by the United Nations OHCHR on the relationship between human rights and technical standard-setting processes for new emerging digital technologies at its 53rd session in 2023.
Context
There is an alarming trend of Internet fragmentation, the so-called “spliternet” which can result from a deliberate strategy led by nation-states, as evidenced by the recent Declaration on the Future of the Internet and discussions held at IGF 2022 in Addis Ababa. Indeed, some states have asserted their sovereignty over the Internet by imposing national or regional regulations to digital platforms, regardless of the need to maintain an interoperable digital space.
Protocols and technical standards have a major role to play to maintain the digital space interoperable, open, secure and inclusive to ensure the protection of users.
While the initial phase of the Internet in the 1980s – 2000s had open protocols that formed the basis of Internet services, the current era of the Internet is characterized by closed protocols. Today’s digital platforms grew in large part by establishing a proprietary protocol layer on top of the Internet’s open protocols. A case in point is the social graph as it exists today for the incumbent social media platforms: each platform has its own propriety and “walled garden” version of friend or follower graph, which cannot be leveraged by the user in an open or exportable way.
This Internet fragmentation and centralization, is both the result of private companies and states imposing their rules on what was an open and interoperable network, and leads to undermining human rights online including users’ security (art 3), their freedom of movement (art 13) and finally their right to ownership (art 17).
View the full consultation here.
