In our brief to the Supreme Court last year, CDT laid out serious concerns these tools raise regarding privacy and First Amendment freedoms – in addition to questions about their efficacy. 

But that doesn’t mean technical solutions can’t address some valid concerns about adult content. In particular, two policies related to internet standards are worth pursuing right now.

First, parents can already set most children’s devices to block adult websites, which depends on sites labeling themselves as adults-only via metadata. Most adult content sites are happy to label themselves as adults-only: it’s cheap and easy, and allowing children to view their content raises legal, regulatory, ethical and commercial concerns that sites would rather avoid. Making these tools more robust — well-defined standards, widely adopted by websites and interpreted by web browsers and parental control tools — can make them more effective.

Alternatively, just as we allow users to request “safe mode” of Google search or YouTube, devices could be configured to request “safe mode” of other sites on the internet. Proactively alerting sites that there’s a young person (or just someone avoiding NSFW content) on the other end of the connection has the advantage of working on platforms that contain content appropriate for general audiences alongside content for adults only.

There’s plenty of work to do to implement these tools, but standards for sites to self-label and for users to indicate their content preferences are already being proposed.

It’s possible that in the future age-verification and age-assurance systems will be able to avoid the worst problems of the current systems, perhaps by associating a government-issued ID with unlinkable digital tokens that can be presented to a website without requiring someone to send a photo of an actual ID card or revealing a government-issued identifier. But for the time being, standards-based solutions like these provide the most practical opportunities both to protect children from adult content and to protect the rights of adults to access the content they want, while also avoiding severe privacy and security issues.

The post Using Internet Standards to Keep Kids Away from Adult Content Online appeared first on Center for Democracy and Technology.

The other speakers and I examined the profound effects the W3C has had on the way the web has evolved from a niche application to something deeply integrated into our everyday lives. My own talk focuses in particular on human rights and internet standards, with a view on what we’ve learned over the past three decades and the importance of our continued work.

We’ve had the basic technology of the web for 35 years, and since 1994, the international community has been working through the W3C to create the standards and interoperability necessary for it to thrive. In that time, we’ve seen the advantages of a global communications network for human rights, including our ability to read, see and hear voices that had been largely excluded from the public conversation before the digital era. We’ve seen activists and others use the web to bring abuses and atrocities to the world’s attention, and we’ve experienced the power of collaboration across national and cultural lines for everything from academic progress to artistic creation.

We’ve also seen the risks, from the invasion of privacy to online harassment, censorship and the power of misinformation, disinformation and propaganda to sway minds. As the W3C reaches a new milestone, we need to realize that we as a global community need intentional work to mitigate the internet’s real dangers to the rights — and sometimes the lives — of billions of people.

The W3C’s history as a multistakeholder organization shows us a promising way forward. When everyone from tech companies to national governments to academics and civil society organizations take part, the array of perspectives in the room helps us take a broader view of the questions about rights that are embedded in the decisions we make about how technologies should work.

For more, watch my presentation below as well as other talks at W3C@30. 

Full Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LNUg5vDWDY

Full Text:

Good evening, I’m Nick Doty, senior technologist at the Center For Democracy and Technology. And it’s such a pleasure to be here to celebrate the 30th anniversary of W3C.

For those who aren’t familiar, the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization fighting to advance civil rights and civil liberties online. We shape technology policy, governance, and design with a focus on equity and democratic values.

CDT was an early organizational member of the World Wide Web Consortium in the 1990s and my predecessors at CDT have been participating in W3C standardization since 1995. 

I’m honored to be able to continue that long-time civil society participation and to be here to speak about the work we are all engaged in to support human rights in web standards.

Over those past 30 years, the Web has been an incredible boon for humanity and for human rights.

There may not be a singular source of human rights, but the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – adopted in 1948 – should be especially meaningful to this community because of its consensus development by countries around the world. 

Looking through that important text, I see the impact of the Web in supporting:

freedom of expression, 

freedom of assembly and association, 

freedom from discrimination, 

access to public services, 

the right to education, 

the right to work, 

and the right to participate in cultural life.

We use the Web now for political organizing, news reporting, social connection, healthcare, interacting with our governments, employers, and schools. It is where we work and learn, where we speak up and where we listen.

And W3C has played an important role in making those rights and freedoms a reality through its collaboration on web standards and interoperability.

The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recognized that importance, and the role of technical standards in particular, in a report to the Human Rights Council. And that report cites heavily the work of W3C as an example of considering human rights impacts of technical standard setting.

Human rights and technical standard-setting processes for new and emerging digital technologies

Anniversaries are a fine time to reflect on those achievements and their importance to a growing number of people around the world.

But as the Web has become an essential part of public and community life, we also must realize the very significant threats to human rights online.

surveillance and threats to privacy (where I have spent much of my career, and where many of you have seen me discussing issues in your working groups)

discrimination, harassment and abuse

censorship and threats to freedom of expression and association

threats to security, safety, dignity or sustainability

In recognizing those threats, we acknowledge a weighty and urgent responsibility to protect users and society in our standards work.

Thirty years ago it might have been possible to unplug and leave the Web behind. Now, for people all around the world, including people living under dangerous and oppressive regimes, that’s simply not an option. We need to think about standards as if lives depend on them: because they do.

I remain an optimist about the potential for technology, especially the Web, to strengthen support for human rights, that tomorrow can be better than today.

But to live up to that promise, our community will need to recommit itself to the essential work of supporting human rights in the design of Web technology.

Human rights must not be an afterthought to the work that we’re doing. In today’s world there cannot be human rights offline if they aren’t protected online. And they can’t be protected online without the careful work of the people here today, among others.

I’m proud of the work that’s already ongoing, including

• Ethical Web Principles
• Privacy Principles, which I hope will be among our first W3C community Statements
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and other work of the Web Accessibility Initiative
• Internationalization work that you heard about earlier this evening
• from colleagues at IETF/IRTF, a published set of Guidelines for Human Rights Protocol and Architecture Considerations
• and I’m especially proud of W3C’s Horizontal Review process, and the consideration of those cross-cutting concerns across all of the Web standards work that we do

But there’s more to be done. As an open multistakeholder standard-setting body, W3C has a precious opportunity to include, collaborate on, address and pro-actively support human rights in Web standards and Web technology. This is not a matter for some other group, but for *us* as a technical and human community.

We need to consider human rights in all the work that we do at W3C in the next 30 years. That includes reviews, but also the development of new standards and revisiting old standards. And to be successful we must be more broadly inclusive of participation from around the world.

To return to the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one article stands out to me:

“everyone has duties to the community” (Article 29)

We are here to celebrate the achievements of the standards-based Web, but also to recognize our duties to the community in supporting human rights in Web technology. 

I look forward to continuing that important work with you all.

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As with other forms of multistakeholder engagement, the Call would benefit from periodic evaluations and assessments to identify areas for improvement and ensure accountability. To its credit, the Christchurch Call Foundation has indicated interest in conducting such an evaluation in the future. In doing so, it can build on the recent CCAN evaluation of a subset of Call members. That evaluation, coupled with the Call’s recent announcement of a new Trust structure to coordinate its activities, makes this a useful juncture to reflect on how greater civil society engagement and meaningful oversight mechanisms are critical to make the Call more effective and durable as a model into the future. And the experience of the Call, in turn, provides important lessons for how to structure multistakeholder efforts to govern the development and deployment of AI technologies. 

The Call has exemplified how standards and protocols can be developed with multistakeholder participation. The Call’s voluntary status has been a boon to getting governments and companies to the table. And, many members of the Call have formalized their terrorism and violent extremism-related policies and published their human rights policies since the Call was established. In the wake of tragic events such as the Buffalo shooting in 2022, where a shooter driven by his support of the Great Replacement Theory live-streamed his attack against Black shoppers in a supermarket, companies in the Call worked together swiftly to take down live streams as well as other depictions of the terror attack within minutes.

What is less clear is how Call participants have adhered to other Call principles such as periodic measurement of the efficacy of enforcement mechanisms, more transparency around enforcement, and engagement with civil society in the drafting and implementation of policies. One fundamental question that has lingered is how the Call should provide accountability when supporters do not adhere to the voluntary commitments.

Based on our experience with the recent CCAN evaluation, we provide the following concrete recommendations for the newly established Trust.

Governance mechanisms are strengthened by periodic evaluations. 

CCAN began a pilot evaluation in 2022 to better understand areas of improvement for the Call and identify ways the Call community at large could guide company and government participants towards greater adoption of the Call commitments. Conducting an evaluation of Call members was critical to determining the Call’s effectiveness three years into its existence. It became more integral when participants began facing new challenges in regulating the online environment, such as the proliferation of highly capable machine learning technologies and the growing number of internet users around the world. Periodic evaluations are necessary to ensure that the interventions participants pursued were appropriate and did not interfere or undermine citizens’ access to their rights.

CCAN was well positioned to play a leading role conducting this first of its kind evaluation. CCAN is composed of a broad array of human rights, counter-terrorism, and internet policy experts from around the world. This deep bench of expertise equipped CCAN with the contextual familiarity necessary to analyze Call participants’ efforts across multiple regions, languages, and legal frameworks and offer recommendations to both individual participants and the Call at large.

CCAN embarked on the pilot evaluation by first choosing ten participants to evaluate based on how long they’ve been a member of the Call and its internal capacity to conduct the evaluation. We evaluated participants against a handful of the Call commitments and used two work streams to complete the evaluation: (1) direct engagement with governments and companies and (2) independent research of publicly available information. Members of CCAN and contracted researchers completed the evaluation based on their expertise and familiarity with the participant.

Meaningful transparency is a prerequisite for the Call to succeed.

The challenges CCAN encountered in conducting the evaluation illustrated the lack of transparency concerning participants’ activities related to the Call and their adherence to its commitments. Call participants often did not disclose or connect the initiatives they pursued to tackle terrorism and violent extremism to the Call at all. It was hard to find evidence that the supporters had implemented their commitments under the Call beyond declarations of intent to do so. If work was undertaken in conjunction with the Call, it was rarely identified as such, making measurement of the Call’s impact difficult. In some cases, Call participants did not even disclose which department or point of contact was tasked with the authority to engage with the Call, making it difficult to gain access to the right person to begin with.

When CCAN did speak with participants, they often shed light on efforts that they had pursued but never publicly disclosed or shared in closed-door Call meetings. In the absence of such transparency, CCAN and the Call at large lacked critical information about supporters’ adherence or actions relevant to the Call. That in turn undermined the coordination function of the Call by reducing opportunities for information sharing and identification of best (and ineffective) practices.

In the future, governance mechanisms need to be in place to incentivize Call participants to be more transparent about work done as part of their participation with the Call or in their broader effort to combat the risks of terrorism and violent extremism online.

Call participants should make greater use of CCAN’s expertise to aid in adherence to the Call commitments and mitigate unwanted risks to human rights.

CCAN’s deep bench of expertise is well equipped to provide guidance to Call participants where gaps or challenges to Call commitments exist. That will require meaningful and regular civil society engagement. Yet, CCAN’s evaluation found participants engaged with civil society and the Call community at large to differing degrees. The Call community, including CCAN members, should aid participants in their adoption of the Call commitments by offering a range of human rights, legal, and anti-violence expertise and considering trade-offs present in specific regulatory, policy, transparency, and engagement initiatives.

Call participants should be required to participate meaningfully in order to remain members.

A few Call participants were members of the Call in name only, treating the Call as window dressing with little to no substantive engagement. Members did not all participate in all Call meetings, with some attending just a few, if any. Poor and disparate participation from Call supporters also impeded a complete evaluation. Evaluated participants were invited to complete a survey to equip evaluators with an understanding of how they complied with the Call commitments, but some were slow to respond and, in one case, never responded at all. 

To boost adherence to the Call commitments, the Call should require that members participate and regularly present forthcoming initiatives intended to adopt the Call’s principles. Otherwise, they should be required to give up their membership so as not to obtain the benefits of saying they participate without living up to their commitments.

Effective multi-stakeholder efforts need accountability.

If the Call wants to live up to its goal of being a global coordinating body of multi-stakeholder actors around a shared goal, it needs to be prepared to speak up when its members are not adhering to shared commitments. Some supporting countries have gone so far as to pursue policies and practices that are in active conflict with the Call’s principles, such as pursuing disproportionate policies to undermine the free and open internet by throttling network access or pursuing opaque takedowns of content without judicial review. 

These efforts – which are often pursued under the guise of combating terror – have resulted in blanket suppression of speech, namely dissent and journalistic inquiry, and undermined democratic rights. They’ve also called into question the Call’s effectiveness. Without adequate oversight mechanisms to hold supporters accountable to the commitments they made when they joined the Call – and the ones they cite when asked about their engagement in multistakeholder processes – the Call risks becoming a marketing exercise for participants who flagrantly disregard human rights.

Periodic independent evaluations and frequent civil society engagement is critical in establishing a baseline of compliance and determining whether participants are adhering to their commitments. Call participants should know that membership in the Call is not a one-time exercise but an ongoing commitment, especially given the dynamic nature of online threats.

Call leaders should encourage future evaluations, including through internal stock-taking exercises and by commissioning independent evaluations. Future evaluations are integral to ensuring the Call remains effective and dynamic, particularly with the advent of highly capable machine learning technology that makes it easier for bad actors to flood online services with malicious content. 

In order to be maximally effective the Call must increase accountability mechanisms. Funding should be earmarked for research and periodic evaluations, and the Call should work with CCAN to develop a consensus-driven and human rights-centered framework to choose evaluators, develop criteria for evaluation, and conduct evaluations.

* * *

Multistakeholder engagement is an iterative process. The Call has been a trailblazer in this engagement with respect to terrorist and violent extremist content. CCAN’s pilot evaluation was a step in the right direction toward continuous improvement of the Call. Ultimately, CCAN’s evaluation with the Call offers reasons for hope, while also identifying lessons for how to improve its effectiveness going forward. Those lessons should inform the structure of other multistakeholder processes, from internet standard development as discussed at the most recent NETmundial+10 convening to new processes that are being discussed in the context of AI governance. It is not enough for companies and others to sign up for voluntary commitments without requisite investment to fulfill those commitments and provide meaningful transparency and accountability. That, in turn, requires that civil society and other experts play an integral role in such processes, with access to information about what steps participants are and are not taking to live up to their commitments and the ability to engage in genuine and independent evaluations. Absent such mechanisms, multistakeholder processes risk being multistakeholder in name only, without providing real benefits. 

The post The Future of the Christchurch Call Foundation and Lessons for Multistakeholder Initiatives appeared first on Center for Democracy and Technology.

Mallory touched on the major issues and controversies before the governing organizations as they relate to fundamental human rights such as free expression and privacy. This included her own work leading the Human Rights Protocol Considerations Research Group as it tackles questions such as the role of privacy protections in stopping domestic partner abuse.

Mallory’s talk also included updates on various initiatives and developments around Global Privacy Control, censorship avoidance, satellite internet access, net neutrality and many other issues.Are censorship circumvention and privacy two sides of the same coin? Has the Metaverse faded away as a consideration? Watch Mallory dive into these topics and more in her talk, which starts around minute 3:34:10.

The post How “I-Star” Organizations Shape Free Speech and Human Rights appeared first on Center for Democracy and Technology.

The report, which represents the culmination of a year-long research process exploring how technical standard-setting processes affect human rights, was recently submitted to the Human Rights Council. Now it’s up to industry, governments and standard-setting bodies themselves to devote the resources and attention necessary to put these recommendations into place.

CDT was pleased to participate in the development of the report through our participation at the Internet Governance Forum and the Human Rights Council, where we provided comments of our own and organized comments with the Internet Architecture Board and other W3C participants. Those comments (the latter, in particular) were frequently cited in the OHCHR report.

This report also builds on longer term research in this area. The Human Rights Protocol Considerations Research Group at the Internet Research Task Force, co-chaired by CDT’s Mallory Knodel, has organized research on this topic since 2015, including a short documentary film (Net of Rights) and an RFC of research on the various areas of human rights impacted by internet protocols.

And the discussion continues. Recently, CDT invited several civil society experts on the topic for a call to discuss how human rights should be supported in standards.

The report outlines a wide array of recommendations for incorporating human rights into technical standards, directed to governments, standard-setting organizations, businesses, and civil society. These recommendations can generally be separated into three categories: Review, Transparency, and Participation. 

Review:

In the standards process, wide review (or “horizontal review”) refers to getting a review from the broader community of the potential impacts and implications of a standards proposal. The report identifies the importance of due diligence to directly identify and address human rights in the standard-setting process and throughout the development and use of standards.

Transparency:

Access to information about the development of standards is necessary for accountability, public oversight, and obtaining input from a wide range of stakeholders. The report recommends that much information should be available to the general public as well as to researchers.

Participation:

Open, inclusive participation is needed for standards to reflect the perspectives of all stakeholders. The report recommends measures to address cultural and financial barriers to broader participation, particularly to increase participation from the Global South and to make a more balanced representation of gender.

Case Study: W3C process

One helpful way to get a sense of how these recommendations can be a useful tool for human rights advocates is by exploring how they might look when applied to an important organization like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), where most standard-setting for the Web takes place. In that real-world context, it’s clear that, while W3C has taken important steps towards putting human rights at the center of its work, there’s still more to be done.

Review: 

W3C’s practices of wide and horizontal review are cited in the UN OHCHR report as a positive example, including its assessments of privacy and accessibility. But the report identifies additional steps W3C should take, including a human rights impact assessment of W3C’s practices more generally. With more resources, including increased industry participation, we could extend the timeframe of reviews: identifying the societal impacts of upcoming work items (like digital credentials, as discussed below) and monitoring the deployed use of web technologies.

Transparency: 

W3C demonstrates best practices for transparency in how its standards are developed and communicated. Web standards, every draft, issue and proposal, and even the debates and conversations that go into making decisions, are all publicly archived and documented.

Participation: 

While W3C has worked to increase the range of voices at the table, with different ways to participate (including Github feedback, hybrid meetings, and lower-investment Community Groups) and has a Code of Conduct to support a positive working environment, the breadth of participation still doesn’t nearly match the people who use or are affected by the web. Significant investment is necessary, in particular from states and large industry players, to help cover the costs of more civil society participation, especially for people from areas outside the US and Europe.

Case study: digital credentials

Looking forward, the UNHCR’s report could be a helpful tool in shaping an emerging set of technical standards: the underlying system for digital credentials.

Digital credentials are a clear example of the profound societal impacts of new technical standards. States increasingly want to issue digital versions of driver’s licenses, passports, and other identity cards and make them available for presentation both in-person and over-the-Internet. Identity verification is proposed as a way to mitigate fraud, to prove personhood and combat AI-generated misinformation, to improve delivery of government services, and even to provide greater privacy and accessibility in presenting credentials to governments and businesses. 

These initiatives rely on cryptographic designs and standards for modeling, accessing, and presenting credentials. How these are designed, deployed, and used will determine how we interact with our own governments, what privacy we have from companies and the government (e.g., motor vehicle departments and law enforcement agencies), and to what extent companies and governments can discriminate against or exclude people from services.

As the W3C considers more direct work on defining and presenting government-issued credentials to web sites, the UN OHCHR report could play a valuable role in guiding the process.

Review:

Industry and civil society are considering the future implications and risks of this work already, but as questions surrounding digital credentials extend beyond well-known privacy topics, this process represents a prime opportunity to conduct a forward-looking review of the potential societal impacts. CDT has advocated for a joint task force or other collaborative effort to consider privacy, free expression, and consolidation concerns, and to start that work now.

Transparency: 

In contrast to many legislative processes and other standard-setting processes, W3C is hosting conversations about digital credentials largely in public, with the opportunity for full review and for public input. (In contrast, mobile driver’s license protocols are developed behind closed doors at ISO, where drafts can only be shared through occasional leaks and we learn about proposals primarily through second-hand rumors. Even the final standards can only be seen by paying fees to ISO, a governmental standards organization, or some other re-seller.) Meaningful transparency requires more than just access, though; key implications of public interest need to be translated from technical specifications into more generally accessible language.

Participation:

An urgent timeline – driven by legislative mandates and alternative deployed technologies – makes broad and deep public participation a real challenge. More governments need to be directly and publicly involved in Web standardization, given the direct impact on the services they provide their citizens and their role as both issuers and verifiers of credentials. W3C rules that limit contributions from non-paying members could interfere with small business participation and should be relaxed. And while civil society colleagues are trying to keep up, it hasn’t been a priority topic for most organizations; this may require more funding to permit them to dedicate the necessary time and expertise.

Driven by government mandates to provide digital licenses to residents and to encourage businesses to request presentation of those licenses online, the reality of digital identification is coming– and soon. Governments, industry, and civil society together have an opportunity now to implement the UN OHCHR’s recommendations in considering the human rights impact of the standards that will underlie this technology, and by doing so they’ll be able to protect their citizens’ most basic rights from the ground up.

The post Implementing Recommendations for Supporting Human Rights in Web Standards appeared first on Center for Democracy and Technology.

Last week, CDT joined a letter with dozens of civil society organizations in which, “… we highlight the areas and aspects of greatest concern, including human rights and gender, support for the OHCHR, inclusive approaches to internet governance, consistency in terminology, and decentralization of power.”

These aren’t new issues for CDT. In the past we’ve pushed the UN to focus its efforts on the most critical ways in which the internet is changing the relationship between governments and people, namely encryption, censorship, meaningful access and weapons: “States have roles that are unique. They continue and enhance engagement in all the mentioned governance processes and ensuring the protection of human rights by helping to strengthen the existing multistakeholder ecosystem of internet governance. They are uniquely placed to solve issues of access, censorship, encryption and weapons of war. They are also the actors who can extend the multistakeholder model to reach within and evolve the multilateralism of the UN itself.” [link https://cdt.org/insights/comments-to-the-united-nations-on-the-global-digital-compact/]

When the first draft of the Global Digital Compact was released, CDT along with the Global Encryption Coalition steering committee officially delivered and submitted comments to the UN to suggest, “… three editorial changes to better articulate the ways that encryption provides protection and enablement of human rights.”

As CDT’s Chief Technology Officer I also signed a joint letter reminding the UN of the role of the technical community in internet governance. “… 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… Therefore, we ask that member states, the Secretary-General and the Tech Envoy seek to ensure that proposals for digital governance remain consistent with the enormously successful multistakeholder Internet governance practice that has brought us the Internet of today.”

As the negotiations around the GDC wrap up in the lead up to the UN’s Summit for the Future, we strongly encourage Member States to preserve the strong and engaged voices of the human rights community in delivering on issues of core importance in multistakeholder internet governance.

Read the full letter.

The post CDT Joins Civil Society Joint Brief on the UN Global Digital Compact appeared first on Center for Democracy and Technology.

***

From the letter:

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. 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.

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.

Furthermore, we note that the GDC is being developed in a multilateral process between states, with very limited application of the 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. We are concerned that the document will be largely a creation only of governments, disconnected from the Internet and the Web as people all over the world currently experience them.

Therefore, we ask that member states, the Secretary-General and the Tech Envoy seek to ensure that proposals for digital governance remain consistent with the 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 the bottom-up, collaborative and inclusive model of Internet governance that has served the world for the past half century.

Read the full letter + list of signatories.

The post CDT CTO Mallory Knodel Joins Letter Urging UN’s Secretary-General and Envoy on Technology to Uphold Inclusive Model of Internet Governance appeared first on Center for Democracy and Technology.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations specialized agency for digital technology, has overseen the WSIS process from its origins. Crucially, the ITU is a “multilateral” agency, meaning that  it has traditionally been a forum for government-to-government negotiations and agreements.

In the case of technical standards, though, our panel revolved around the idea that nation-states can’t do it alone. While U.N. member states have all signed the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, the human rights framework needs civil society to play a role — in this case to ensure that essential rights aren’t forgotten when technologies are designed. 

Governments can’t effectively police each other, for one thing. And of course, some governments have little or no interest in protecting human rights in practice, no matter what agreements they’ve officially (and in some cases, cynically) endorsed in the past. Civil-society watchdogs, by contrast, can highlight human rights issues in countries around the globe, without the same risk of being caught up in the complications of state-to-state diplomacy.

But civil society organizations face serious barriers to participating in standards-setting bodies, even those like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that are more “multistakeholder,” (that is including a formal role for companies, academics and nonprofits.) They often struggle to find staff with the knowledge and experience to decipher the complex issues involved in questions around technical standards, for example. Nonprofit organizations may also have trouble affording the cost of travel to international meetings that can take place many thousands of miles away from where they are based. While not true of the U.N., technical discussions at standards bodies are typically held in English, and organizations outside the English-language parts of the globe may encounter difficulties translating highly technical conversations into their own languages.

That’s why our WSIS panel agreed that governments need to lend civil society a hand. If more national delegations to ITU discussions included civil society delegates as a matter of course, the conversation around human rights and internet standards would be far richer – and ultimately more inclusive. Instead of multilateral, these discussions should be multistakeholder, involving representatives who can raise issues that some states would prefer to ignore.

More than five decades ago, when researchers first put together the technology that would birth the modern internet, few could have predicted the extent to which our lives would be mediated by digital networks today. Now, technology standards have become important sites into which we can extend the human rights accountability framework. These conversations should not — and cannot — leave civil society out in the cold.

The post <strong>U.N. Panel Shows Why Civil Society is Vital to Human Rights on the Internet</strong> appeared first on Center for Democracy and Technology.

Our organizations call for hearings and a more deliberative process to assess the adverse consequences of extending copyright coverage in this manner and to explore more appropriate ways to address the concerns of standards development organizations about incorporation of standards into law by reference.

Read the full letter here.

The post Joint Letter to House Rules Committee Opposing Pro Codes Act appeared first on Center for Democracy and Technology.

As part of CDT’s support for human rights in internet standards and emerging technology, our organization will co-host a panel at the event with the ITU, the U.S. government, the Dutch government and ARTICLE 19. As CDT’s Chief Technology Officer, I’ll join the panel as part of our ongoing work connecting human rights and internet standards, an effort that dates back to the turn of the millennium. We look forward to highlighting how privacy, accessibility and freedom of expression are vital for democratic and equitable digital governance.

Internet standards underlie digital networks as we know them today, allowing machines and their users to communicate regardless of where they’re based or which operating systems they employ. In just one sign of the rising prominence of the panel’s topic, the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights recently recognized the importance of creating internet standards that support free expression and universal access in resolution A/HRC/53/42. 

The ITU, the United Nations specialized agency for digital technology, has overseen the WSIS process from its origin. CDT is proud to join with the ITU to highlight the ways human rights considerations are infiltrating the arcane space of internet standards, to the potential benefit of us all. As a next step, some States have suggested creating a new ITU process to identify how its technical standards can better consider human rights.

I’m looking forward to addressing the UN in the WSIS+20 panel, which comes at a critical time for human rights in technical standards for an institution like the ITU. While I expect some push back from some States on incorporating human rights considerations into internet standards, this is an important moment for those of us who have been building this field of engagement. We need to build broad support among stakeholders now, so that we’re prepared to take on the criticisms of the process that are certain to come. The future of human rights on the internet may depend on it.

Details of full event here.

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