DigitalMedusa's adventure update
I started DigitalMedusa in September 2021. I had identified a devastating trend for Internet and digital governance and wanted DigitalMedusa to slow down that trend. The trend is blaming everything and anything on the Internet, over-regulating the Internet and blame its global, interconnected nature for every societal problem we have.
So DigitalMedusa is here to provide a different narrative. A narrative you don’t hear as much.
Since then, DigitalMedusa’s mission has evolved: We aim to connect people to the global Internet and protect their unfettered access through policy analysis, research and outreach and engagement.
DigitalMedusa does not deny problems exist when connecting people to the Internet nor the issues that are raised by digital services and platforms lack of governance.
So we have done a lot of work towards bringing “trust and safety” to digital services. We have undertaken outreach and engagement for Digital Trust and Safety Partnership, an industry consortium that has a set of safety best practices and in the process of setting up an independent assessment process.
We are also involved with the civil society arm of Christchurch Call, Christchurch Call Advisory Network which aims to address the issue of online terrorist behavior. We also work with the National Democratic Institute on how to improve the governance mechanisms of alternative and emerging platforms such as Telegram. We wrote a report about Telegram governance a few years ago published by Yale Law School Justice Collaboratory that mentions some of the issues. Personally I am also involved with Prosocial Design Network, and a member of their board of directors. PDN is a not for profit network that focuses on the behavior of users and positive interventions that can create prosocial behavior instead of heavily focusing on content governance and take-down.
A major focus of DigitalMedusa is on Internet infrastructure governance. This aspect of the Internet, despite its important for connectivity, is not as “shiny” and “cool” as social media platforms so it goes unnoticed. Internet infrastructure includes the critical properties of the Internet that are essential for connectivity. They are identified by Internet Society and include number resources and domain name system (DNS) (including the website name that you put in your browser) . One issue that DigitalMedusa follows closely is Domain Name System abuse and the work of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). There is a lot of focus on the concept of multi-stakeholder governance applied to various technologies such as Artificial Intelligence as well which we have recently written about.
As it is within the mission of DigitalMedusa to protect the connectivity of everyone, especially those vulnerable and underserved, we did some elaborate research on how sanctions affect access to the Internet, funded by RIPE NCC.
As our research method we use human rights impact assessment and governance and connectivity impact assessment.
So what is next?
Some of our activities are ongoing, but we are trying to focus on bringing decentralization back to the Internet, starting from DNS resolvers. Our approach is to enable as many providers around the world as possible to provide DNS resolvers so that we can decentralize the Internet without the B-word (blockchain).
Another idea is the open source compliance tools for digital trust and safety and sanctions. During our outreach and engagement and research on sanctions, we came to the conclusion that the Internet system is need of more open source best practices and compliance tools for smaller actors or other actors that want to focus on providing their technologies to everyone and connecting people.
And a few words about AI governance: we will provide a different narrative about AI governance as it relates to Internet and platform governance soon!
Stay tuned as we share our experiences of this great adventure!