CITP, in partnership with Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) and the New America think tank, last week kicked off a year-long collaboration with a special event, The Future of Global Digital Governance.

Panelists Monica Greco, a CITP Fellow; CITP Associated Faculty member Andrés Monroy-Hernández, and New America CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter discussed the critical need for an international plan to manage the digital domain amid such harms as misinformation, discrimination and privacy violations.

Slaughter, a member of CITP’s Advisory Council, said the 1990s version of the internet as a place of peace, brotherhood and knowledge has fallen short. “We have moved from the utopian vision of the internet … to the splinter-net,” she said — a virtual space that the pandemic revealed to be as divisive as the physical world.

The hybrid event drew more than 200 people for a robust discussion about the risks in an ungoverned digital domain. Monroy-Hernández discussed the popularity of decentralized technologies — including federated alternatives to existing platforms like Twitter — and cryptocurrencies in countries with unstable governments. Greco, meanwhile, said some populations are vulnerable to exploitation in the digital realm. She pointed to the Rohingya refugees whose biometric data was shared, without their consent, with the government of the country they had fled.

The full discussion can be viewed below on our YouTube site.