The third decade of the 21st Century is imminent and we find ourselves contemplating an extraordinary range of opportunities and challenges. The Internet has reached an estimated 50% of the world’s population and this percentage is expected to increase with the rapid spread of 4G and 5G mobile and switching technologies. Vastly higher access speeds are anticipated in both wired and wireless modes. Undersea cables are being laid at a furious pace. Extremely ambitious plans are already unfolding for literally tens of thousands of low and very low Earth orbiting satellites that may make Internet access almost inescapable even at the poles of the planet! Added to that is an expected avalanche of programmable and networked devices sometimes called the Internet of Things.

Meanwhile, it seems as if new applications of machine learning arrive daily, lending credibility and utility to speech recognition and understanding. Even though the exchanges are relatively simple, they result in answers to questions, control of household and office devices, translations among languages and natural sounding speech generation. Moreover, the same general purpose machine learning tools result in successful image analysis applied to medical diagnosis and scene analysis, facial recognition and support for autonomous vehicles.

As one of the early developers of what is called the Internet, I have watched it evolve from an experiment sponsored by the US Defense Department to a globe girdling system driven by a wide range of private and public sector actors using a range of business models. Moreover, the advent of the World Wide Web application unquestionably triggered a tidal wave of new developments leading to massive generation and sharing of information, ease of discovery through search engines and new businesses bolstered by the arrival of smartphones and their “apps” in 2007. This vast, rich, and fertile infrastructure has given rise to millions of applications, hundreds of thousands of new businesses, billions of users, and GDP growth not seen since the late 19th and mid-20th Centuries.

As this technology has become readily available to the general public, private sector and governments, there has been a concomitant rise in abuse ranging from fraud, the spread of misinformation and disinformation, social turmoil, identity theft, use of digital technology to commit old and new crimes, harmful behaviors, security risks, loss of privacy and a laundry list of other ills. We should not be surprised at this. Any new, disruptive technology brings with it the potential for emergent behaviors and phenomena exhibiting beneficial and harmful characteristics. Human nature and its strengths and weaknesses give rise to both sides of a tidal wave of change. On the positive side, the Internet and World Wide Web have unleashed constructive uses that would have been unthinkable even twenty years ago. Massive amounts of information can be searched in milliseconds. Games and movies and other entertainments are discoverable and accessible on demand. Goods and services can be ordered and delivered in real time in some cases and overnight or within a few days in other cases.

These benefits and deficits manifest wherever the Internet is accessible and because the Internet is essentially insensitive to crossing of jurisdictional boundaries, the phenomena are apparent on a transnational basis. It is precisely for this reason that activities such as the Internet Governance Forum have been created. The global forum has spawned national and regional forums in aid of discussions with more local focus. A wide range of issues have been catalogued in these meetings and have spawned a range of institutional and documentary responses, some of which are referenced in the appendices to this book.

Since the first meeting of the Internet Governance Forum in 2006, the attendees have worked hard to articulate the benefits and risks of widespread Internet use. As the 2020s approach, it is apparent that the multi-stakeholder discussion that has informed the IGF must advance from discussion to a more action-oriented agenda. Having identified problems and issues, the IGF needs to enable and empower its secretariat to monitor and report on progress toward solutions and resolutions. While the IGF is not likely the correct forum for problem solving, it can become an instrument to highlight successful initiatives and draw attention to areas still in need of attention.

What might an agenda for problem solving include? In the absence of enforceable treaties to deal with harmful behaviors undertaken through Internet enabled applications, one might begin to formulate norms for digital behavior that might someday become the basis for treaties. The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace^[1] has taken that approach and documented a number of recommendations. The Secretary-General of the United Nations established a high level panel on digital cooperation which has delivered its final report^[2] that has triggered an initiative to engage in dialogue aimed at establishing constructive and cooperative multi-stakeholder efforts towards solutions. Better inter-jurisdictional cooperation among law enforcement agencies and the identification and apprehension of criminals using the Internet can increase safety and security of the general public and institutions of all kinds.

I am concerned that the demonstrated benefits of an open, accessible and fully connected Internet will be eroded by government actions intended to protect against abuse but which may have the ancillary side-effect of fragmenting the Internet, eroding human rights and stifling innovation. The Internet Governance Forum and other organizations with a stake in the continued utility of the Internet must stand against this erosion of the Internet's nature and promise by helping all stakeholders to understand the potential impacts of hasty or ill-considered actions to counter abuse. We have arrived at a time when the adoption of principles must now be augmented with implementable norms and ultimately enforceable international treaties that strike the requisite balance between freedoms and human rights and harmful behaviors that create unacceptable social and economic deficits.

The technical and academic community has a major role to play in all of this. Software and hardware design practices are needed that increase the security, safety and utility of the Internet and its applications. Guidance for user education and operational practices are needed to make effective some of the technical solutions such as strong, two-factor authentication, cryptographic protection of confidentiality, software update practices and responses to the brittleness of machine learning tools and applications. While open source software and hardware design have been powerful mechanisms for propagating best practices, the safety and security of these open source offerings can be questioned. When everyone is theoretically in charge of vetting for quality and bug discovery, no one is in charge. Consequently, widespread use of open source in products and services may well propagate unexpected and exploitable vulnerabilities and even deliberate malware into the ecosystem. A regime of accountability for quality assurance is sorely needed as our daily lives become dependent and interdependent on an increasingly complex and potentially fragile infrastructure. Incentives such as “bug bounties” can help. Hoarding of “zero day” exploits for purposes of offensive use should not be permitted to become the norm.

An agenda that contributes to the safety, security, reliability and usability of the Internet and its applications should be the order of the day for all stakeholders and the IGF can be one means to deliver that message widely and effectively.

^[1] See https://cyberstability.org.

^[2] See https://www.un.org/en/digital-cooperation-panel.