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Use digital diplomacy to keep networks open, secure, interoperable, and rights-respecting while helping partners build durable local capacity.
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AI-researched, unverifiedLast Reviewed
Jul 5, 2026
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What is failing, what we would change, and the conclusion we are willing to defend.
Global connectedness should not be written as naive faith that technology automatically creates peace. Networks can carry research, trade, remittances, education, telemedicine, and democratic speech. They can also carry surveillance, cyberattacks, coercion, shutdowns, disinformation, dependency, and fragile supply chains. The current policy question is how to build connection that is open enough to create opportunity and secure enough to survive pressure.
The world is more connected than ever and still deeply divided. ITU's 2025 Facts and Figures report says almost three-quarters of the world's population is online, while 2.2 billion people remain offline, mostly in low- and middle-income countries. The OECD AI Principles were updated in 2024 for a world of generative AI, information integrity, privacy, and interoperability. G7 digital ministers have been coordinating on cross-border data-flow rules, shared AI governance, technical standards, secure networks, undersea cable resilience, and digital public-sector AI.
Make open, interoperable, secure internet access a standing diplomatic objective, including opposition to shutdowns, censorship, coercive surveillance exports, and forced data localization that exists mainly to control people.
Work through allied and multistakeholder standards bodies on AI, cybersecurity, digital identity, post-quantum cryptography, privacy-preserving data exchange, satellite connectivity, and undersea cable resilience.
Support digital public infrastructure abroad only with safeguards: privacy law, cybersecurity, open standards, procurement transparency, user control, and local capacity.
Help partners build connectivity, compute, data, and skills capacity so AI and digital services do not deepen dependency on a handful of foreign platforms or governments.
Keep trade mechanics in ECON-04 and ECON-05, and compute export controls in AI-07. This issue owns the diplomatic and infrastructure layer: standards, networks, capacity, rights, and resilience.
Treat scientific and educational exchange, talent mobility, and research networks as strategic connectedness, paired with security screening where risk is real.
The party's stance is neither techno-utopian nor isolationist. Connected systems need rules, redundancy, rights, and trustworthy institutions. Without those, connection becomes another surface for control.
Turn frustration into useful pressure.
If this position misses evidence or a lived consequence, challenge it. If it holds up, help test it locally and connect it to the issues around it.