a_diplomat

ᶦ ᶠᵉˡᵗ ˢᵒ ˡᵒⁿᵉˡʸ ᵇᵘᵗ ᶦᵗ'ˢ ᵇᵉᵗᵗᵉʳ ⁿᵒʷ

This seems more directed towards parts of Silicon Valley than the rest of the world. The EU recognized that technology = politics long ago, and has been in a race with China on defining global norms.

The "GDPR effect" will be seen in many other areas in the coming years, and I (as a EU technology-focused diplomat) feel that most US corps haven't realized the scale of what's lurking around the corner.

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/digital-se... https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-european-union-ai-act...

I was stationed in Rwanda for several years, and visited your operations centers several times. Truly awesome stuff, that's also helped Rwanda in a bigger way, by giving the country well-deserved recognition for its propensity towards innovation.

We could vote against another proposal, but opening up the framework of human rights for renegotiation would be a substantial thing to do, and would set a precedent. Not working for the US or the UK.

Legitimizing their own models of governance, both internationally and domestically, would be their main driver in multilateral settings. In some cases, such as the ITU, it could also be about getting technical norms approved that mirror their state goals (https://www.justsecurity.org/75741/chinas-dystopian-new-ip-p...)

There are horizontal issues to every resolution, and every resolution is written in a context. If you open up for environmental crimes, then some country will want to open up for "illegal speech" directed towards the state.

Yup. And also, authoritarian government uses <insert reason> to open up the framework for negotiation and weaken existing norms.

It wouldn't be so much about the rights themselves being authoritarian, but that opening up the framework for renegotiation would weaken existing norms. You could, for instance, almost be certain that some countries would like to put more limits to freedom of expression.

It doesn't mean that they can never be established, it just means that in the current international political climate, there is very little interest from democratic states to open it up, since the consequences could be so vast. If the world was nicer and everyone were friends it would be easy.

Hi. Diplomat working with UN issues here. The issue at hand here is not this resolution in itself. It's the fact that opening up human rights to "new" rights sets a precedent. And that precedent will be used by other countries to shift the language on human rights in a more authoritarian direction - or dilute human rights as such.

So it's basically about using one set of issues, which in substance are hard to fight, to weaken human rights as a whole. But it could just as easily have been about something else, like the "right to development", which has been pushed by authoritarian countries for years.

It's also the case that there are a lot more people living in undemocratic countries than in democratic ones. I understand the need to have multiple solutions to this problem, but this can never become an alternative for platforms taking more responsibility for content themselves. And, for democratic countries to create a grand coalition to set norms in this space.

In other words, they want people to do fact checking for free for them.

Actually no, it's the opposite. It's governments regulating companies, and thereby taking responsibility. Going a step further would make governments actively intervene in day-to-day-operations.

This is just not correct. Governments are acting on this throughout the world. Don't conflate governments with politicians. For well-functioning states, state agencies are dealing with this through well-established protocols that don't need political clearence. This means that the countries where politicians are the most visible and calling for action could very well be the ones that have prepared the least.

sure thing, send me a dm!

Totally understand. I have to say that watching the drones getting captured when landing is one of the most futuristic things I've seen. You guys have done some great things in Rwanda - I lived there over the past 4 years, so I have firsthand knowledge.

There are several negotiations ongoing in various committees of the UN, where the issues that surface in the "real world" are negotiated: information warfare (such as election interference), responsibility for information across borders etc. https://www.cfr.org/blog/united-nations-doubles-its-workload...

Basically, it's about trying to defend international norms from an onslaught of attempts to make states the primary defender of the informational realm, and thereby legitimise opression.

Yeah, first job for UN was coding a shitty CRUD system in order to keep track of HIV infections in East Africa.

I've been to your airfield in Rwanda! It's such a great company.

I'm a diplomat working on international norms for cyber and information warfare. I'm trying to get countries to agree on how to use and not use their capabilities, the influence on global democracy, the connection to armed conflict and the future of interstate relations. In practice, this means meeting a lot of people and spending a lot of time negotiating with other countries in scrappy conference rooms in the UN and elsewhere, sometimes in weird anonymous locations.

On the side, I'm an advisor to an impact investment foundation that is expanding their operations to East Africa. They're setting up an investment fund and accelerator programs to help companies tackle development challenges.

I'm also involved in a startup that is working to develop a new fintech app to create more data and access to credit for small-scale businesses in East Africa. It's a basic PWA app, not released yet, which has some real potential of scaling up and addressing some pretty substantial development challenges. (If anyone is really good with writing a bare-bones PWA based on Gatsby optimised for speed and low-bandwidth environments, please give me a shout).

I've had a weird career. Started out as a programmer in the late 90's, did my own startup in the mid 00's which was a half-baked success, moved to Africa for a few years and worked for the UN, moved back home and had kids, moved back to Africa and worked as a diplomat covering lots of conflicts in the Great Lakes region, moved back home again, worked for the impact foundation for a year and then rejoined diplomacy to do cyber work.

Freedom of speech is, as you can read in the link I provided, one of several rights, not the only right.

1) That would be a question for US courts, as all those companies are based in the us.

2) Yes.

3) Yes.

Also, the original resolution was passed in 2012 under the document name A/HRC/RES/20/8. It is biannualised and reintroduced every two years in the Human Rights Council. The original resolution is more crisp and concise. The 2016 version was a compromise between many different interests. There is a section on the importance of applying a human-rights based approach when providing the internet, but this does not mean that internet access is a human right.

I negotiated this resolution on behalf of a UN government. The title is very misleading. The resolution states that human rights are applicable on the internet, not that access to the internet is a human right.