A Nowruz update
It’s a little late but not too late to say happy Spring Solstice (Nowruz) and to some of you, happy new year.
Here is a Digital Medusa new year update for you (we are lucky to celebrate two new years, for the end of 2023 post, see this LinkedIn post)
Outreach and engagement at the Digital Trust and Safety Partnership
Digital Medusa has been undertaking Outreach and Engagement for DTSP for around two years. This has been very fulfilling and I think a lot about how to strategically do meaningful engagement with civil society and others. There are a few best practices out there that we can use but I will also write about different methods of engagement.
Sanctions and the Internet
We published the Sanctions and the Internet report last May. Digital Medusa attended RIPE NCC’s roundtable in Brussels, presenting the report to the EU community. Next week, we will present the paper in an academic workshop at TU Berlin. See the interesting Internet infrastructure program they have here. This workshop will be very useful to update the research. However, for the continuation of this research, we need to secure more funding.
Our focus on Artificial Intelligence and Internet governance
We have started focusing on Artificial Intelligence and Internet governance. I presented the rough idea during a seminar at the University of Washington. Find the slides below. The idea is to contextualize AI and concretely discuss how it has affected or will affect Internet governance.
The DNS resolvers research
As we mentioned in 2023, we received a small grant to focus on undertaking research on DNS resolvers. We are at the compilation stage of a list of interviewees. In the next few months, we will reach out to interview network operators around the world, as well as independent organizations that provide DNS resolvers, in order to understand their incentives and risks of providing DNS resolvers. We also did a two-day workshop with other grantees at the Sloan Foundation, you can find our presentation here:
What we have found at this early stage of research is that: we need more diversified sources of data at the infrastructure level to have a good understanding to study social, economic and Internet phenomena. We need to curate more data and have access to diverse sources to 1) avoid data bias as much as possible 2) relying on a single source of data could introduce a point of failure.
This project is funded by The Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund (D//F), a collaborative effort supported by Ford Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Omidyar Network, Schmidt Futures.
Internet infrastructure and encryption
We want to continue working on understanding Internet infrastructure and encryption. During our last session, we tried to have a better understanding of how we can actually create a movement that can encrypt the Internet infrastructure. We learned from the past successful efforts such as Let's Encrypt, and asked if that model could actually work for other parts of Internet infrastructure, and if not, why? Watch the session here:
Digital Trust and Safety and Internet infrastructure in Afghanistan
We continue monitoring the situation in Afghanistan with regards to connectivity and trust and safety. Find out what happened to .AF in this piece: https://digitalmedusa.org/what-happened-to-af/
Tech policy piece that we wrote about Internet development in Afghanistan in 2023 can also be found here: https://www.techpolicy.press/supporting-afghanistans-internet-development-and-digital-trust-and-safety-despite-the-taliban/
Human rights and Internet Impact Assessment
Digital Medusa started writing a few pieces on rapid human rights impact assessment. It carried out an experimental and quick human rights impact assessment on Government Advisory Committee (GAC) communique to ICANN. Hopefully, this will become something periodic that Noncommercial Stakeholder Group at ICANN can do as well. The other type of much needed assessment is Internet impact assessment. We used Internet Society’s toolkit to briefly illustrate in the sanctions report how sanctions can impact the open, global and secure Internet. We aim to continue to undertake the Internet impact assessment of policies, laws and Internet related decisions.
Overall ideas that are not beneficial to preserving the global and open Internet are abundant. But we shall never ever give up.
Reach out if you want to know more about any of the topics we are working on or if you think we need to pay attention to an anti-Internet idea that is brewing somewhere on this planet!