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Comments It is clear that, in the face of restrictions on movement and physical meetings imposed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, ICTs in general, and the Internet in particular, have greatly facilitated the continuation of work in many areas, allowed teaching and learning to continue – albeit with shortcomings, and allowed people to communicate personally even when they could not meet physically. It is also clear that improvements are needed in the use of ICTs in general, and the Internet in particular.
Many countries have been hampered in their efforts to combat the pandemic by the use of social media to propagate incorrect information and conspiracy theories (so-called “fake news”). In our view, censorship is not a solution, the solution involves better, and greater, use by governments of modern media, which includes the Internet.
Further, the pandemic has highlighted the value of data and the importance of ensuring and equitable distribution of the value-added of data, including in particular medical data.
We offer the following proposals for ITU’s role in improving the role of ICTs in case of possible future pandemics:
(a) IETF, ISOC, ITU, UNCITRAL, and UNCTAD should be mandated to study the issue of externalities arising from lack of security, which has technical, economic, and legal aspects. In particular, UNCITRAL should be mandated to develop a model law on the matter.
(b) Countries should agree to negotiate new treaty provisions as suggested below.
(c) ITU should collaborate with ILO and IBE (International Bureau of Education) to develop guidelines on teleworking and remote learning;
(d) ITU-T should be mandated to develop a standard videoconferencing user interface;
(e) ITU should collaborate with WHO and other relevant agencies to develop guidelines on the appropriate balancing of data privacy and use of ICTs – including in particular the Internet – for tracking, tracing, and other pandemic-reduction measures;
(f) ITU should be mandated to discuss which aspects of the Internet should be operated as public infrastructures;
(g) Our contribution to 2017 Open Consultation of CWG-Internet suggests actions by ITU to address the fact that the Internet has changed from a largely democratic network of autonomous nodes to a distributed feudal structure, which centralises flows of data into a few hands, thus resulting in digital colonialism;
(h) ITU should consider adopting guidelines on the designation of important ICT platforms as public utilities, on platform interoperability, and on limitations to mass surveillance (whether government or private).
(i) ITU and WHO should be mandated, in collaboration with other relevant agencies, to develop model strategies to orient data and AI systems to be pandemics-ready, and to develop model national policies regarding the use of data and AI to deal with pandemics.
The body of the contribution develops and justifies the above proposals. It also notes that the pandemic was facilitated, and its severity was initially exacerbated, by the extensive physical travel resulting from globalization. Globalization was largely facilitated by ICTs, including in particular the Internet, in order to increase efficiency. But efficiency does not equal effectiveness, much less resiliency. While the Internet itself proved to be resilient during the pandemic, the global supply chains built on the Internet turned out not to be resilient. There is a need to reduce the reliance on global supply chains in order to increase resilience; this might result in a reduction of international Internet traffic.
Finally, the contribution argues that it is imperative to stop any attempts to negotiate e-commerce agreements, which will creating binding rules for the Internet, in the WTO and other trade negotiations, because those bodies are not multistakeholder and, more importantly, the proposed rules would have very negative effects for both developing countries and most citizens of developed countries, because they are intended to limit the ability of governments to take actions, whereas one of the lessons of the pandemic is that there is no substitute for government intervention at the national level in times of crisis, in particular because of externalities.
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