Artificial intelligence may be technology’s hottest topic—more important than electricity or fire, according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai—but another has a plausible claim to second. Digital public infrastructure, or DPI, does not loom as large as AI in the public or policymakers’ consciousness. Yet its recent adoption and impact—quieter, stealthier—are arguably as significant. According to Bill Gates, “DPI is revolutionizing the way entire nations serve their people, respond to crises, and grow their economies.” The United Nations Development Programme describes it as “a potential game-changer.”
Last October, a Global DPI Summit, the first of its kind, attracted more than 700 participants to the outskirts of Cairo; many were developing-world policymakers and entrepreneurs. They were drawn by a technology that has seen rapid uptake in countries as varied as Brazil, India, Ethiopia, Morocco, the Philippines, and Zambia. The spread of DPI has been especially noteworthy in the global south, where there are fears that the advent of AI could leave the region further behind the West in the realm of digital tech. Coming after a long litany of false promises and misapplied technology in the developing world, DPI may represent one of the first successful large-scale interventions to ease poverty, transform government services, and unleash innovation.
Beyond these specific benefits, DPI may also have broader, global ramifications. In an increasingly bifurcated technical landscape, characterized by superpower contestation and a crippling lack of cooperation, DPI offers something more constructive—the digital equivalent of the Non-Aligned Movement, perhaps, and a model for a more collaborative, inclusive digital ecosystem. The approach is not without its own risks and challenges; but done right, it could help revitalize that beleaguered and increasingly vilified phenomenon that we know as the internet.
Like many nascent technologies, DPI’s precise definition remains something of a work in progress. Conceived narrowly, the term relates to a set of publicly available tools for digital payments, identity, and data exchange, all combined in an integrated digital “stack.” More recently, a number of other domains and functions have been mooted as additions to this stack, including modules for education, agriculture, and energy conservation. Rather than a specific set of functions, then, DPI is perhaps most helpfully thought of as an approach—a “way of thinking,” as some have put it. In this broader conception, the goal of DPI is to shift certain core operations in the digital world—e.g., payments or authentication—from private to public management, so that they more closely resemble infrastructure. The World Bank calls DPI “common digital plumbing”; others draw analogies with roads or railway tracks. The underlying premise is that control of today’s digital ecosystem is overly concentrated in a handful of companies and states. DPI aims to redistribute the balance of power and provide a new foundation (“infrastructure”) for both public and private innovation.
Despite its recent prominence, DPI has arguably been around for at least a decade (even if it wasn’t always called as such—the term has really gained currency only over the last two or three years). India, the country most commonly associated with the approach, launched Aadhaar, its identity scheme, in 2009. Today, more than 1.3 billion Aadhaar cards have been issued, making it one of the more remarkable adoption stories in global technology. Estonia created X-Road, its widely adopted data exchange layer, in 2001. Brazil, another country frequently associated with the approach, launched its digital payments system, Pix, in 2020. DPI’s slow, incremental build has recently accelerated. According to a DPI map produced by David Eaves and colleagues at University College, London, over 100 countries now have (or are in the process of implementing) various forms of DPI.
There are many reasons for the enthusiasm. Policymakers have long looked to digital payments as a way to reduce “leakage” (a euphemism for corruption and other inefficiencies). By some estimates, DPI has saved the Indian government $34 billion by cutting out middlemen and reducing red tape. Advocates of DPI also cite its potential to foster inclusion—for example, by bringing the unbanked into the formal economy and enabling low- or zero-fee micropayments for small businesses. DPI has also benefited from good timing: Its star rose considerably during COVID, amid a general move toward a cashless economy.
Perhaps the biggest, if often unrecognized, catalyst for the approach has been a shifting geopolitical climate, especially as it has affected global technology governance over the last decade or so. Once upon a time, decisions about the internet were primarily reached through technocratic consensus, at bodies like the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), or the International Telecommunication Union. This largely—if not entirely—depoliticized approach meant that technical standards and frameworks were chosen mostly on their merits, rather than because of national or ideological interest. (ICANN’s early 2000s adoption of international domain names to support non-Latin scripts was a good example.) That approach has all but broken down. Technology is increasingly central to public life, and technology policy has by extension become an instrument of statecraft. The internet and its underlying infrastructure are today subjects of heated geopolitical contestation, battles between what Columbia law professor Anu Bradford calls competing “digital empires.”
China and the United States are the biggest of these empires (Bradford also lists the European Union), and their increasingly zero-sum struggle to dominate virtually every aspect of technology—from standards to chips to privacy—has resulted in something of a digital Cold War. A new “virtual Berlin Wall” has arisen, forcing countries to choose sides between the unregulated mercantilism of American Big Tech and a statist, surveillance-based Chinese model. Beijing offers the developing world favorable financing and subsidized equipment, but these gifts (part of the country’s Digital Silk Road initiative) come laden with perils such as a loss of privacy and national autonomy. The alternative is often hardly more palatable: American tech companies pose very much the same risks. As Patrick Achi, the former prime minister of Ivory Coast, recently explained, countries like his are caught on the horns of a dilemma. “We are like subjects, without good choices,” he said. “Our digital futures are being determined in the big power centers.”
On this scorched landscape, DPI offers a welcome alternative—a potential “third way,” as the Dutch politician and commentator Marietje Schaake recently put it, a means for countries to chart their own course when it comes to managing data, digitizing government, and customizing applications to local needs. A budding ecology in Bengaluru now offers countries open-source modules and technical assistance to implement locally managed DPI solutions. These include the Modular Open Source Identity Platform, which allows countries to repurpose code for digital identities, and the recently launched “DPI-as-a-packaged-solution,” or DaaS, designed for “plug-and-play” implementation. Estonia’s open-source X-Road is likewise used by over 20 countries, including Cambodia, Brazil, Namibia, and Madagascar.
Such examples of modular, customizable, and domestically controlled software are particularly useful for smaller countries that have less technical and financial capacity. (Trinidad and Tobago, for example, is the first country to implement DaaS.) They make it easier to digitize economies, and they reduce the risks of superpower dependency. Because many of the tools are open source and interoperable, they also foster collaboration. Regional groupings such as the Gulf Cooperation Council, Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and the Caribbean Community have implemented or are considering cross-border integrations of identity and payment systems. India’s Unified Payments Interface has likewise been adopted in countries as varied as Nepal, Singapore, and France.
Technical integration is often symbiotic with political cooperation. By strengthening regional blocs and alliances, DPI may challenge the existing geopolitical order. For developing countries thus far at the mercy of superpowers and Big Tech, it holds out the prospects of achieving the much sought-after (yet often chimeric) goals of “digital sovereignty” and “digital independence.”
The DPI movement is young, still inchoate. As the approach gathers steam, its own limitations and challenges will become more apparent. Detractors point to the possibility of data breaches and other privacy violations, the risk that greater digitalization of public services could marginalize populations lacking technical literacy, and the danger that public investment could distort competition and markets. Every technical intervention represents a delicate balance of risk and opportunity; advocates of the approach argue that the right policies and governance frameworks can help bring out the positive potential of the technology.
The stakes of getting the balance right are huge—for the developing world, of course, but perhaps for the entire global digital ecosystem as well. The advent of AI has intensified geopolitical rivalries, and with them the risks of fragmentation, exclusion, and hyper-concentration that are already so prevalent. The prospects of a “Splinternet” have never appeared more real. The old dream of a global digital commons seems increasingly quaint; we are living amid what Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, calls “technofeudalism.”
DPI suggests it doesn’t have to be this way. The approach’s emphasis on loosening chokeholds, fostering collaboration, and reclaiming space from monopolies represents an effort to recuperate some of the internet’s original promise. At its most aspirational, DPI offers the potential for a new digital social contract: a rebalancing of public and private interests, a reorientation of the network so that it advances broad social goals even while fostering entrepreneurship and innovation. How fitting it would be if this new model were to emerge not from the entrenched powers that have so long guided the network, but from a handful of nations long confined to the periphery—now determined to take their seats at the table of global technology.
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