Areas for urgent action
Some of the areas in which action is needed include efforts to:
Restore a genuinely multi-stakeholder approach to internet governance, including rebalancing power through meaningful mechanisms for collective engagement by citizens/users;
Refresh antitrust & competition regulation, taxation regimes and related enforcement mechanisms to align them across like-minded liberal democracies and restore competitive fairness, with a particular focus on public interest media;
Recommit to publicly funded democratic infrastructure including public interest media and the creation, selection and use of online platforms that afford citizen participation and deliberation.;
Regulate for greater transparency and accountability from the platforms including algorithmic transparency and great accountability for verifying the sources of political advertising;
Revisit regulation of privacy and data protection to better protect indigenous rights to data sovereignty and redress the failures of a consent-based approach to data management; and
Recalibrate policies and protections to address not only individual rights and privacy but also to collective impact wellbeing. Policies designed to protect people online need to have indigenous thinking at their centre and should also ensure that all public agencies responsible for protecting democracy and human rights online reflect, in their leadership and approaches, the increasing diversity of our country.
