Relevance to Theme: The problem of how to achieve security, stability, safety and resilience needs to be discussed in the context of understanding the role of sovereignty in cyberspace. National sovereignty is the organizing principle of the traditional international political system. In the traditional sovereign model, national governments take most of the responsibility for protecting security, stability, safety and resilience. But because sovereignty is bounded by territory, their authority stops at their borders. The Internet, in contrast, is transnational in scope and provides the potential for borderless connectivity. Thus in cybersecurity traditional security and stability practices have had to be modified, often relying on multistakeholder cooperation and cross-border operations in which the power of states is shared with many other actors. Today, in a context of cyber-attacks by state actors and a globalized digital economy, efforts to assert territorial control into cyberspace and project it onto all things digital are gathering momentum. Across the world, governments of many political complexions are considering or have adopted broad policy frameworks they say are necessary to maintain what they variously describe as cyber, data, informational, digital, or technological sovereignty. They have been implemented via such measures as forced data localization, barriers to cross-border data flows, routing and surveillance requirements, digital industrial policies and trade protectionism, and censorship and blocking of classes of data flows or Internet-based platforms. Russia and China are prime examples but many other countries are assessing these different models. This roundtable includes participants from Russia, China, Brazil and Argentina as well as Iran, the USA and Europe.
Relevance to Internet Governance: The tension between national sovereignty and the global Internet is probably the single most fundamental Internet governance issue today. The Internet protocols create a globally connected virtual space in which anyone from anywhere in the world can communicate; in the technical structure of cyberspace distance and territory do not matter. Governmental authority, on the other hand, is bounded by geographic territory and each government is supposed to have supreme authority in its territory. Ever since the World Summit on the Information Society, governments have been trying to insert the concept of sovereignty into Internet governance discussions. On the other hand, many Internet users, platforms and service providers have been promoting the benefits of seamless global interconnection. There is a clash between the two distinct models of Internet governance. The tension between sovereignty and globalization plays out in several Internet governance issues. The debate over data localization often appeals to “technological sovereignty.” The global debate over cybersecurity and cyber norms also has struggled to understand how notions of sovereignty can be reconciled with the globalized espionage and attack capabilities provided by cyberspace.
