This book’s purpose is to explore new frameworks, institutional arrangements, rules, and policies for governance of the digital world. As digital technology and digitization rapidly intertwine the many dimensions of society, billions of people have witnessed a quiet and seamless integration of the Internet, software, platforms, algorithms, and digital devices into their daily lives, as well as into many forms of governance and decision making in the public and private sectors. Digitization is transforming nearly every sector of the global economy and society, with immense potential benefits to healthcare, education, public safety, and more. However, conceptually and practically, these new technologies carry significant risks.
Digital technologies already guide a vast array of decisions in both the private and public sectors. For example, private technology platforms such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, Uber, Twitter, YouTube, Microsoft, and Airbnb effectively control global access to information, services, and products. They play a significant role in setting the parameters of access to markets and freedom of expression through their proprietary algorithms. The power and effect of these algorithms are not noticeable or discernible to the global populace. Public sector decisions also are increasingly dictated by algorithmic systems of governance. For instance, predictive algorithms are used by states to calculate future risk posed by inmates and have been used in sentencing decisions in court trials.
Algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) are augmenting and replacing human decision making in immigration and refugee systems in some countries. Algorithms are used in decisions about who has access to public services and who undergoes extra scrutiny by law enforcement. Risk-assessment algorithms have been used to identify “vulnerable” children and potential victims of child sexual exploitation so that governments can act to protect them. However, the lack of adequate governance frameworks makes oversight of these processes difficult.
There is a growing anxiety and tension regarding governance of the digital world. On one hand, the digital world is viewed as an idealistic global common (essentially, a common or shared commodity, such as an asset or resource), with information and knowledge to be shared in spaces beyond national jurisdictions. On the other hand, the digital world is perceived as providing services and products controlled by a few technology conglomerates and a handful of countries. In between these two visions, new problems abound. Fears arise regarding monopolies that control global information, human rights violations, and the social impact of automation and AI, as well as threats to democracies, terrorism, cybercrimes, and growing extremism. Yet is there a better way to navigate these circumstances? Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” offers an inspiring metaphor to explore new frameworks to govern the digital world (Hardin 1968). For instance, a better way to think of misinformation, targeted political ads, extremist videos, and biased algorithms is as polluters of common resources, such as the model proposed in the tragedy of the commons.
Governing the digital world means going beyond what legal rules impose. Digital governance is not just about establishing formal rules. It is inserted into a series of power relations, in which the different actors of the digital world relate, define policies, and build a complex framework of formal and informal norms that organize the different layers and processes involved in the construction of digital technologies and their use by society. These power relations are of interest to us in this book. The relationship between power and technology is subtle. In industrial society, the creation and control of things gave its actors influence over the political system and the economic system, making it possible to influence people’s behavior. At present, we are experiencing a change in the power structure. The influence of people’s behavior does not arise from the creation and control of things, but from the creation and control of information. Big techs have commodified information and created digital technologies that have a huge influence and control on people’s behavior. These technology companies are nested with governments, creating a complex network of influence and power (Floridi 2015). We are in a phase when power structures are changing, and when information commodification creates new challenges for how societies can govern the digital world.
Governing the digital world means thinking about how institutions are built and how they can be effective in governing a complex world. The digital world is comprised of power relations involving governments, technological companies, civil society, and international organizations. How do these actors fit into the governance process of the digital world? How is the governance of the digital world designed? What institutions are needed in the digital world to constitute governance that results in the greatest benefit for society and that is resilient to face the different turbulent contexts that technological change carries?
The digital world is made up of various opportunities and different perspectives on how people live, communicate, think, and behave. In addition, the digital world contains various layers of communication infrastructure, software, protocols, devices, and data that constitute cyberspace, the Internet, social media platforms, applications, systems, data, and information. The digital world is a place designed by humans to connect people, information, devices, and services. The main capital of the digital world is knowledge and information. Whoever controls knowledge and information influences collective decisions and establishes new power structures. The information society requires new norms and practices to govern the digital world. Governing means to create an institutional order that promotes collective actions to steer effective results for society. This is the challenge addressed by this book: How can society create institutions that govern the digital world in a way that is beneficial to society?
As the reader will notice throughout this work, we take as a background an institutionalist perspective on the governance problem. The complex requirements for fulfilling governance require effective institutions to be created and sustained (Pierre and Peters 2005). Institutions are the set of formal and informal norms, and the shared understanding that constrains and prescribes the action of the actors (Peters 2011; Ostrom 2010; March and Olsen 1984). In this perspective, we are interested in thinking about the organizational, normative, and practical factors of governance institutions applied to the digital world. We are interested in explaining how and why governance institutions are needed and how they can be designed and sustained so that the digital world can be governed and produce a greater benefit and sustainability of digital resources for society. As we said earlier, the digital world requires governance institutions to mediate its power relations and produce societies that are more democratic, supportive, and capable of learning and managing their resources.
Governance institutions for the digital world are not simply about creating legal control or regulation. Governance for the digital world is a complex undertaking, done in non-territorial spaces with multiple actors and huge differences. Governance for the digital world means creating meaningful institutions that become collective action in the everyday life of governments, companies, and various citizens and organizations. An institution is a set of organized rules and practices, embedded in a structure of meanings and resources that are relatively invariant in the face of individual turnover and changing external circumstances. Through institutions, norms become practices and stipulate behaviors in various situations. When defining governance institutions to the digital world, we seek norms capable of establishing rules, standards, or patterns of actions according to a desired behavior of the actors in the digital arena.
For example, institutions such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) define a protocol that makes it possible to exchange computer-to-computer information and how this information can be traced to cybersecurity. On the other hand, institutions such as the United Nations (UN) and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have made efforts to establish regulations and models for the digital transformation process. The set of these institutions is very broad and diverse. Throughout this set, the objective is to define norms that are compiled and incorporated into the practice of agents, so that digital technologies can be governed.
This book explores answers—still initial and provocative—to this central question. The reflections presented in this book have a theoretical and conceptual nature, to identify the main challenges for the governance of the digital world. We do not intend to present a complete answer on how the digital world should be governed; rather, we state the challenges and central elements that must constitute a perspective for the governance of the digital world. Understanding governance for the digital world is based on the premise that governance is a political problem. In other words, we take the approach that “[u]nderstanding governance is basically a matter of understanding the nature of state–society relationships in the pursuit of collective interests” (Pierre and Peters 2005).
In the next chapter (Chap. 2), we present the initial issues, and the structures and problems of governance for the digital world. Chapter 2 is conceptual and defines the book’s roadmap. In Chap. 3, we focus on governance issues for organizations that adopt and use digital technologies in their activities. Basically, we deal with how organizations—public and private—are promoting the digital transformation process and how it implies new challenges, risks, and problems for society. Note that this first approach starts from the role of digital technologies for change, in which they play a pivotal role in the new patterns of action in society. Chapter 4 deals with the design of institutions essential to governing t...