In 2020, the international community will mark 75 years of the founding of the United Nations. It is a somber moment because multilateral cooperation is still embarrassingly difficult despite seven plus decades of experience, and because key organs of global governance continue to reflect a world of old privileges. Can we make a new start with governance of digital technologies, particularly their latest manifestation which promises to extend human intelligence in new directions?

The Report of the UN Secretary-General’s independent High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation, the most diverse ever in UN history and the first to be chaired by non-government representatives, makes a case for a three-step approach. First, a recognition of shared human values such as inclusiveness, respect, human-centredness, human flourishing, transparency, collaboration, accessibility, sustainability and harmony to shape the development and deployment of technologies. Second, a Global Commitment for Digital Cooperation to “enshrine shared values, principles, understandings and objectives for an improved global digital cooperation architecture”. Third, the elaboration of a new digital governance architecture for which three models are offered as inspiration: Internet Governance Forum Plus, Distributed Co-Governance Architecture, and a Digital Commons Architecture.

The task, which given the nature of these technologies has to embrace a wider circle of actors than the traditional UN inter-governmental machinery, is formidable and brooks no delay. There are also risks on the way. First, there is a risk that these steps are seen excessively in terms of a grand design for peace and cooperation, which internationally minded idealists have passionately advocated since Jean-Jacques Rousseau, instead of a distributed ‘architecture’ for digital governance which allows for context-specific flexibility and innovation.

Indeed, one could argue that the three-step approach prescribed by the Panel for global digital governance could even be applied at the level of the firm – the founders or the employees discover through a process of dialogue a set of common values in their social and political context, commit to cooperate within and across the firm’s boundaries with relevant stakeholders, and then put in place mechanisms and capacities to implement the good governance of digital technologies. Similarly, at the level of a State, the government, the private sector and civil society – the sarkar, bazaar and samaaj of India’s digital cooperation enthusiasts - should get together to put in place digital governance principles and mechanisms keeping in view the top international tier of guiding values, principles and possible norms.

Another risk on the digital governance path is exclusion: of dynamic youthful geographies in Africa, Asia and Latin America, of startups and SMEs, of women, of the non-initiated - those who are not technologists or those who do not speak the special vocabulary of digital governance. Losing diverse perspectives and inclusiveness is not only immoral but it also enhances risk and diminishes the long-term economic opportunity coming from digitalisation and the AI/data revolution.

Then, we could get digital governance wrong by being divorced from practice, governing without doing, regulating for abstraction. In Brazil, China, India and Kenya, to take a few examples from emerging economies, digital technologies are seen as a leap-frogging opportunity. The success of indigenous programmes for digitally-driven financial inclusion, e-governance and e-commerce platforms, and the rise of a new elite of tech entrepreneurs has given many countries of the Global South the confidence to go their own way on digital technologies. Over-emphasising ‘misuse’ at the expense of ‘missed’ use will drive them away from the global governance of digital technologies.

A practice-rich approach governance should not be misunderstood as accepting the status quo or passively accepting what tech developers and companies roll out in the future. Instead, it is about creating smart learning loops between policy and practice. That is the only way policy can keep pace with the rapid shift in the technology landscape, and practice can respect the intent behind policy. It is about creating ‘common rails’ and ‘guard rails’, the former to level the playing field, promote inclusive demand and scale innovation, and the latter to prevent misuse and exclusion.

It could be argued that it is not the job of multilateral organisations to promote the use of digital technologies. They are better off setting norms and standards for use as well as tackling select cases of misuse such as development of lethal autonomous weapons. But if we do not bend the direction of private sector investments and national efforts with successful examples of ‘good’ use, misuse cannot be avoided. You do not get someone to stop thinking about a fish riding a bicycle by asking them to stop doing so. You have to give the mind something better to focus on.

It is particularly urgent to shift minds away from world dominance through Artificial Intelligence to solving the world’s most urgent challenges through AI. We need ‘moonshots’ to nudge thinking on data, algorithms and computing capacity away from scarcity to abundance and from conflict to cooperation. In line with the UNSG Panel’s recommended approach to digital public goods, these moonshots can be prepared in multi-stakeholder platforms involving the UN and related agencies but not necessarily owned or mandated by them. The excitement around them can attract a younger generation of digital natives, the practical idealists who are seizing the initiative on climate change for example, and channel their energy and talent into making digital technologies work for everyone.

The governance that comes out of these platforms of practice in areas such as health and financial inclusion (Recommendation 1a of the Panel’s report) can extend to other areas. Its benefits would be more obvious to communities of practice in civic, private and public sectors. Such an approach will not only be more meaningful for diverse countries and populations, making digital governance more broad-based but also more sustainable in the long run.