Digital Sovereignty

Digital sovereignty is a blanket term that refers to the ability to control over digital assets, such as data, content, or digital infrastructure, or over the use of those assets. While this concept has lasted for over decades, it has gained attention again for several reasons, including concerns over state surveillance, over online harms, and an inclination towards the economic benefits of cyberspace.

All across the world, different countries have different interpretations of digital sovereignty. This was highlighted in “The 2012 ITU World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT)”. A proposal from Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Sudan called for “equal rights” for all governments to manage internet naming, numbering, addressing, and identification of resources. This would have given Governments the right to exercise to monitor Internet activities but however, this proposal was suspended suggesting that the ITU should “continue to take the steps for it to play an active and practical role in the development of broadband and the multi-stakeholder model of the internet.”

One of the primary reason major reason of Government’s interest in Internet Surveillance is the emergence of new technologies like cloud computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, block chain and others. This is not just because of the government’s interest in economic growth, but also to seal the debates on bench marking and future governance. Other reasons include a desire to uplift domestic tech sector.

Conservative authorities might also wish to extend their control over the internet to manage access to information to suppress.

The repercussion of varieties of these approaches to tackle issues like data security, online harms, etc. resulted in growing regulatory and technical fragmentation of the global internet.