![]() ![]() The person familiar with the situation said the Biden administration is engaging the FOC’s advocates and fully aware of its concerns, but that the idea for the alliance is not necessarily at odds with the U.S. According to the text of a letter seen by POLITICO, people connected to that coalition are urging the Biden team “to seek multi-stakeholder input as you consider creating new initiatives that may be duplicative of, or shift focus or resources from, the FOC’s work.” It’s unclear how the alliance would differ from existing networks such as the Freedom Online Coalition. ![]() “In pursuing this proposal, we are not seeing to splinter the internet but offer a collective response to actions by a growing number of countries, particularly authoritarian countries, and thereby avoid a descent to a fully Hobbesian future where beggar-thy-neighbor conduct becomes the norm,” the document states. In addition, the proposal calls for a commitment to ensuring open and interoperable access for software and apps among members non-discrimination in domestic regulations and shared commitments regarding data localization. The alliance’s core principles would include: a collective commitment to develop and implement high standards for data privacy, data security and cyber security a commitment to cooperation on tech platform regulation and information integrity and commitment to establish a forum for technical cooperation on cybersecurity standards and incident response. The document that lays out the tech alliance proposal is tagged as “Non-Paper//Discussion Purposes Only.” It argues that one reason to launch such a democratic-led alliance is to counter the rise of “an alternative vision of the Internet as a tool of state control promoted by authoritarian powers such as China and Russia.” “All of them are at this point pre-decisional and subject to significant refinement.” ‘A fully Hobbesian future’ “The administration is kicking around a lot of different initiatives and kicking the tires on a lot of different ideas,” the person said. But a person familiar with the upcoming summit stressed the ever-changing status of the ideas under discussion: The document describing the tech alliance, for instance, has been “overtaken by events,” but wouldn’t say what that meant. Spokespeople for the White House-based National Security Council did not offer comment for this story. “There are a lot of big questions on the table that the initial gathering won’t address, like what to do about weaker democracies that are showing regression.” “The symbolism of the gathering is important, but the actual change on the ground that the summit would generate remains to be seen,” said Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. That’s also true in the United States, where a polarized political environment has blocked Biden’s efforts to push through priorities such as voting rights legislation. Although none of the suggested commitments appear to be internationally binding, many will require governments to sell them to constituencies back home and allocate funding to making them real. Biden is, after all, hosting the summit during a year that has seen at least six coups in countries from Myanmar to Sudan.īut it’s far from clear how many countries attending the summit will sign up for commitments or how many will follow through. ![]() ![]() Overall, the variety of ideas underscores Biden’s view that strengthening the world’s democracies at a time of rising authoritarianism requires tools beyond mere rhetoric about free-and-fair elections. ![]()
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