The RSA Conference was founded in 1991, as a single-panel discussion focused on cryptography. Over the years, the conference, now held in multiple locations around the globe, has grown into the world’s preeminent cybersecurity event, a high-powered confab that attracts some 40,000 participants annually, including eminences such as Bill Gates and Michio Kaku, celebrities such as Chris Stapleton and Christopher Lloyd, and a trickle of government officials.
The RSA Conference was founded in 1991, as a single-panel discussion focused on cryptography. Over the years, the conference, now held in multiple locations around the globe, has grown into the world’s preeminent cybersecurity event, a high-powered confab that attracts some 40,000 participants annually, including eminences such as Bill Gates and Michio Kaku, celebrities such as Chris Stapleton and Christopher Lloyd, and a trickle of government officials.
On May 6, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken joined the roster at the Moscone Center in San Francisco to deliver a keynote address. As befit the venue, Blinken’s speech included references to spyware, ransomware, and the perils posed by quantum computing to current methods of cryptography. But in reality, his topic was far more capacious—and ambitious—than cybersecurity. In a speech titled “Technology and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy,” Blinken laid out a sweeping agenda for political freedom, global innovation, and economic growth. More worldview than specific policy prescription, the address introduced a new organizing principle for U.S. digital diplomacy—and diplomacy in general.
Officially, Blinken’s speech marked the release of a long-anticipated strategy document from the Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy (CDP), created in 2022 as a unit within the State Department. The buildup to this release has been characterized by extensive deliberations (and occasional discord) over lines of responsibility and authority across various parts of the government. (Blinken opened his speech by acknowledging that “move fast and break things” is the “exact opposite” of how the State Department works.) The result of these deliberations is a principle that Blinken called “digital solidarity”; this principle, he added, would henceforth serve as a “North Star” for U.S. digital diplomacy.
As with all neologisms, the contours of digital solidarity remain something of a work in progress. Where is this North Star likely to lead? And what will it mean for U.S. foreign policy and for the future of the internet itself?
In fact, the term “digital solidarity” is not entirely new. The concept appears to have been first referenced in 2022, by Pablo Chavez, in an article that focused on the potential for greater U.S.-European Union collaboration. (CDP’s strategy document includes a footnote crediting Chavez.) In his article, Chavez defined digital solidarity as a “path to achieving technological self-determination through partnerships and alliances among open, democratic, and rule-bound societies”—a formulation that the State Department largely hews to, though in a more expanded form, so that it applies beyond the EU to all U.S. foreign relations. Blinken’s speech includes a number of examples of digital solidarity in action, including America’s work with partner nations to counter Iranian cyberattacks on Albania and Chinese threats to U.S. infrastructure, as well as the coalition of (largely Western) nations that have come together to counter Russian digital warfare against Ukraine.
Beyond these illustrative examples, though, probably the most revelatory—and relevant—aspect of Blinken’s remarks was tucked into a glancing, somewhat oblique, reference about a third of the way into his speech. “We’re committed not to ‘digital sovereignty’ but ‘digital solidarity,’” Blinken said, pausing briefly for emphasis. Digital solidarity, then, is perhaps best understood oppositionally: what it is not, or what it seeks to replace.
Digital sovereignty is a multifaceted concept; it means different things to different people. Most commonly associated with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s push for a less Western—and, though this part isn’t usually articulated, more authoritarian—internet, the phrase has also been used by the EU, in a 2020 European Parliament paper, to signify the bloc’s “ability to act independently in the digital world.” More recently, the concept has been used by several countries, especially in the global south, to refer to what some have called a process of “digital decolonization” or “data decolonization.”
Across these various iterations, digital sovereignty has over the last decade or so come to represent something of an organizing principle for a potentially new—and possibly newly invigorated—global digital ecosystem. Call it Global Commons 2.0. Digital sovereignty serves today as a moniker for a network that is less centralized, less Western, and less rapacious of consumer data. Depending on one’s perspective (and geopolitical orientation), it can also mean a network that is less free, less global, and more susceptible to state-sponsored surveillance. In both connotations, digital sovereignty signifies a network that is less American. As a recent PEN America report put it, digital sovereignty is “a result of significant global concerns over the negative consequences of the hands-off ‘American model’ of digital governance”—characterized by a laissez-faire attitude to tech companies and consumer privacy—and “the outsized control that both the American government and American-based internet titans appear to have over the global internet.”
U.S. championing of digital solidarity is, therefore, perhaps best understood as a riposte to the growing valence—and, for the United States at least, growing threat—of digital sovereignty. At its core, the concept can be thought of as encouraging something like the digital equivalent of free trade agreements. It suggests a world where like-minded nations with similar values band together to govern and help define the global digital ecology. This message is most directly aimed at democratic (or at least nonautocratic) states that remain, in the words of Adam Segal, a senior advisor at CDP, “on the fence” in the increasingly zero-sum geopolitics of tech policy, where rivalrous global powers—especially the United States and China—seek to shut each other out in areas including telecom infrastructure and chip manufacturing. But the message of solidarity is also directed, if more implicitly, at certain traditional allies, especially the EU, which has for over a decade now engaged in a series of low-grade skirmishes with the United States over data rights, privacy, market concentration, and the nature of the social compact in the digital era.
Jack Goldsmith, a legal scholar and former U.S. assistant attorney general, has explained these skirmishes as expressions of sentiment in Brussels that the “hegemony of U.S. internet firms [is] nothing less than a danger to the European way of life.” To this anxiety, the State Department now seems to be replying: Yes, the differences among us are real, but they are minor when set alongside the chasms that separate us both from, say, China or Russia or Iran. What’s a little spat over data rights? The real existential battle is over the continued shape—at least in the form we’ve come to know it—of the internet itself.
A skeptical view of digital solidarity might be that it simply represents a U.S. attempt to reclaim lost cyberterritory—yet another iteration of U.S. self-interest dressed up in the garb of freedom and universal human rights. It is true that the Washington establishment has recently awoken, somewhat belatedly, to its waning moral and regulatory influence on the internet (the creation of CDP and the launch of its strategy document being prime examples). Still, a purely self-interested interpretation of digital solidarity would be uncharitable.
At its best, the concept of digital solidarity summons something of the original, animating spirit of the internet. Blinken’s speech is replete with references to openness, globalization, and a more democratic world. These passages are infused with an idealism and optimism that hark back to a certain lost innocence, a golden era before the network’s promise was sullied by the depredations of Big Tech and state authoritarianism. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this new approach, though, is the way it combines idealism with realism. Digital solidarity may be nostalgic, but it isn’t utopian. CDP’s strategy document is also inflected by a clear-eyed—if somewhat resigned—acknowledgment that the internet has irretrievably changed and that the old vision of a seamless global network, underpinned by shared universal values, is all but dead.
Some 80 countries now have policies that restrict cross-border flows of data. In 2023, Access Now, a digital rights organization, counted 283 internet shutdowns across 39 countries, a 41 percent increase from the previous year. The long-dreaded “splinternet” is undeniably upon us; the internet is today less a global commons than a patchwork of firewalled, often incompatible digital fiefdoms. On this increasingly constrained landscape, digital solidarity may represent something of a defensive play—but it could also represent the last best hope of salvaging (even if in an incomplete, fragmented form) the original dream.
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