By: Anit Mukherjee
In a significant achievement, the members states of the United Nations adopted the Global Digital Compact (GDC) at the 79th Session of the UN General Assembly held in New York last week. The goal of the GDC is to build “an inclusive, open, sustainable, fair, safe and secure digital future for all”. While objectives like universal connectivity and inclusion are universally agreed, the GDC wades into the tricky undercurrents of global debates over data governance, human rights and more importantly, the regulation of emerging technologies — artificial intelligence more specifically.
Signing on to a “compact” is probably the easy part: it is a non-binding statement of intent which makes everyone look good. However, as the heads of states and other dignitaries make their way back to their day jobs, the challenge would be to nudge them to take action to make the GDC work in an ever expanding, complex and fragmented digital world. As new technologies emerge and diffuse at a speed that governments especially in the Global South find hard to keep up with, there is no other option than pooling resources to rebalance the power of the global platforms and the State.
To be fair, the GDC has been able to forge a consensus on a document that is grounded in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which takes a ‘development-first’ lens to digital transformation. These include digital literacy and skills, data privacy and information security, and interoperable data exchanges and standards. It highlights the role of digital public infrastructure to accelerate the achievement of SDGs and cross-border data flows to provide a level playing field for developing countries to benefit from a globalized market for goods and services.
The GDC also calls out the increasing power of digital platforms (mostly based in the United States and China) as a source of economic and social instability, urging them to play a more responsible role in guaranteeing human rights and protecting democratic governance. While it stops short of calling on governments to regulate digital platforms more effectively, the GDC seeks to “(e)ncourage United Nations entities, in collaboration with Governments and relevant stakeholders, to assess the impact of misinformation and disinformation on the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals” (Para 35e).
Perhaps the most significant objective outlined in the GDC is to “enhance international governance of artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity”. This is also where it is probably at its weakest. The section on artificial intelligence (AI) reads like an organization that is trying to catch up when the other runners are already out of sight. While helping “build capacities, especially in developing countries, to access, develop, use and govern artificial intelligence systems and direct them towards the pursuit of sustainable development” may sound like a noble cause, the fact of the matter is that AI systems are prohibitively expensive for countries to develop on their own. Even high-capacity countries of the Global South such as India, Brazil and South Africa would find it difficult to match the human and financial resources invested by the private sector in the United States if they are to develop their own systems.
As we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Global South is at the back of the queue and will be among the last to benefit from technological breakthroughs, be it in digital, energy or health sectors. The GDC’s focus on AI, while relevant at present, overshadows the need for a strategic vision of how global cooperation in technology can benefit the poorest and the most vulnerable. What it does, however, is to provide a broad scope for countries of the Global South to cooperate and co-create solutions relevant for their development needs and priorities. The power of cooperation will hopefully be more than the power of a few countries – and companies – to determine the fate of three quarters of humanity. Digital transformation should work for the benefit of development of the countries of the Global South, not to their detriment.
Anit Mukherjee is a Senior Fellow for the Global Economics & Development program at ORF America.