Atlantic Council DIGITAL FORENSIC RESEARCH LAB
ISSUE BRIEF
An Introduction to the Freedom Online Coalition: Understanding the First 10 Years of the World’s Democratic Tech Alliance
ROSE JACKSON, LEAH FIDDLER,
The Democracy + Tech Initiative creates policy practices that align global stakeholders toward tech and governance that reinforces, rather than undermines, open societies. It builds on the DFRLab’s established track record and leadership in the open-source field, empowering global communities to promote transparency and accountability online and around the world. The Initiative examines how the tech that connects and informs people is funded, built, and governed, and how that affects the viability of rights-respecting and democratic societies around the world. The Initiative is designed to: • Center human rights and democracy in tech and policy debates; • Shape what happens next by looking beyond the current tech and democracy flash points; • Ensure decisions about global tech include equities and stakeholders around the world; • Connect and align siloed communities and issues in government, industry, and civil society; and • Elevate a new generation of diverse leaders with crosscutting expertise to shape policy and industry outcomes.
DECEMBER 2022 JACQUELINE MALARET
Democratic and authoritarian nations are in a global competition for the digital world, amid a bid to renew or remake the world order. On one side is the long-standing global norm that the Internet is a global good, governed by a multistakeholder community and designed to be free, open, secure, and interoperable. On the other side is a model antithetical to the universal rights and democratic norms around which the United States and its allies organize. That authoritarian model advances a version of the Internet in which states leverage technology to shatter citizen expectations of privacy, free expression, and assembly. Core to the authoritarian strategy are efforts to drive a wedge between the historically effective alliance of democratic nations working collectively to ensure everyone, everywhere can benefit from a digital ecosystem in which basic rights are embedded. The growing variance in approach between democratic countries in governing their own use of technology only serves to broaden that wedge. As the authoritarian model spreads, it is politically and practically shifting the online experience of billions of people, including those within democracies. The stability and sustainability of a free, open, secure, and interoperable Internet relies on democracies’ ability to rebuke these efforts and defend the Internet as a key infrastructure to advance human rights. In addition to countering authoritarian repression abroad, this includes grounding their own use of technology in democratic principles and working to prevent emerging innovations from being misused to undermine human rights at home and around the world. A failure to do so will only accelerate the authoritarian capture of the Internet, and cause a global loss in access to speech, expression, and prosperity.