S G Dickinson

@sgdickinson

Internet & digital policy, government use of ICTs, women in IT. I tweet live from relevant meetings.

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S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· 9d

Looks like the UN Global Dialogue on Al Governance folks are over-relying on generative AI to be accurate when creating their own web pages: the 11th STI Forum was *this* year in May. The next Global Dialogue will be held before the *next* STI Forum, which will be the 12th iteration of the forum.

Screenshot of Global Dialogue on Al Governance homepage with wrong information:
"Save the Date: Global Dialogue on Al Governance 2027
The next Global Dialogue on Al Governance continues in New York from 3-4 May 2027, back-to-back with the 11th Multi-stakeholder Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals."
(The meeting is actually back-to-back with the 12th Multi-stakeholder Forum )

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· 10d

It's happened. The ITU Council 2026 has been called to discuss the venue of Plenipotentiary 2026, due to be held Doha, Qatar, 9-27 November. It's been one of those situations where nobody wanted to offend host Qatar or any of the warring parties causing the location of Plenipot to be under a cloud.

ITU COUNCIL
GENEVA 2026
Extraordinary session of the Council-26
The extraordinary session of the ITU Council 2026 will take place on 25
August 2026, from 1200 to 1500 hours (Geneva time), at the ITU Popov room.
It is open to Council Member States, Observer Member States, Resolution 99 (Palestine), the six Regional Telecommunication Organizations (CITEL, ATU, APT, LAS, RCC, CEPT), and the nine nominated Sector Members to C26

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Jun 27

For anyone wondering, these were the 12 options for the #IGF2026 overarching theme that were discussed by the MAG.

1. Governing the Future of Intelligence (original formulation)
2. Shaping the Future of Intelligence
3. The Future of Intelligence
4. Digital Intelligence
5. Governing the Future of the Internet
6. Governing the Digital Future We Want: from Commitments to Implementation
7. The Internet's Future in the Age of Intelligence
8. Shaping Our Digital Future
9. Shaping the Internet's Future in the Age of Intelligence
10. Governing the Internet in the age of intelligence
11. Governing the Future of Intelligence: a Shared Responsibility
12. Governing the Digital Future

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Jun 24

#IGF2026 Open Consultation: Kenyan host propose an overarching theme for this year's IGF: Governing the Future of Intelligence: Sovereignty, Trust, and an Open Internet

HOST COUNTRY PROPOSAL • EXPRESSED AS A TITLE
Governing the Future of Intelligence
Sovereignty, Trust, and an Open Internet
Introduction
The age of intelligence is here, but governance is the challenge. Sovereignty names the capability to shape one's own digital future. Trust is what allows societies to adopt these systems with confidence. And an open Internet is the foundation on which both depend. Held together, the three are the argument - not a list of topics, but a single claim about how intelligent systems should be governed.
OTHER OVERARCHING THEMES PROPOSED
Promoting Digital Commons for Development • Democratising Al Resources • Interoperable Al Governance for Humanity - each sits within
Kenya's theme as a subtheme or priority topic.

THE CONTEXT
The world is entering the age of intelligence
The global digital ecosystem is entering a new phase in which intelligence whether artificial, human or collective — is increasingly embedded in economies, public services, communications, security systems,
knowledge production and everyday life.

RESHAPING HOW SOCIETIES CREATE VALUE
Artificial intelligence
Data infrastructure
Digital public infrastructure
Cloud computing
Emerging technologies

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Jun 21

You know you're becoming rabid naturalist when you save the leech that made a very bloody mess of your ankle for its very own photo & video shoot... and you admire the lovely Morse code-esque pattern on its body. For anyone wondering, its species is Chtonobdella bilineata, BTW.

A leech with yellow-orange stripes on its body, sitting in a puddle of water.

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Jun 18

Not at all related to digital policy or the UN, but was so excited to find a wombat burrow all by myself, I just had to share! (There’s a red-bellied black snake I’ve seen 3 times nearby, so I’m very careful where I walk)

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· May 31

1/ I've clearly spent too much time on the UN ODET website today. I've found that under the "Stay Up to Date" section, in amongst 4 official UN-badged social media accounts, the Tech Envoy's personal Substack account is included.

Screen shot of UN ODET "Stay Up to Date" links section, which includes official UN badged LinkedIn, X, Bluesky & UN news web page, along with link to Tech Envoy's personal Substack account

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Apr 4

Wonder how many geek kids found this on their Easter egg hunt. Also, love how far Easter has drifted from Christian appropriation of pagan fertility festival to commercial appropriation of movies that failed to update their depiction of dinosaurs, even when science proved they had feathers.

Photo of a packaged chocolate easter egg with a chocolate dinosaur baby hatching out of it.

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Mar 18

The UN's Global Dialogue on AI Governance (an outcome of the Global Digital Compact) is seeking written submissions from stakeholders through to April 30: The form only announced yesterday & 115 submissions already received: forms.office.com/pages/respon...

Global Dialogue on AI Governance
Submit your inputs to the Global Dialogue on AI Governance. Deadline for submitting inputs: 30 April 2026, 11:59pm EDT.

On 26 August 2025, the General Assembly established, within the United Nations, the Global Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence Governance (AI Dialogue).

The AI Dialogue will involve Governments and all relevant stakeholders and serve as a platform to discuss international cooperation, share best practices and lessons learned, and facilitate open, transparent, and inclusive discussions on AI governance.

The AI Dialogue will convene in 2026 in Geneva, on 6 and 7 July, and in 2027, in New York (dates TBD).

The Co-Chairs of the AI Dialogue, Ambassador Egriselda López of El Salvador and Ambassador Rein Tammsaar of Estonia, encourage all stakeholders to submit their comments and recommendations via this form.
When you submit this form, it will not automatically collect your details like name and email address unless you provide it yourself.

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Mar 17

This is an interesting decision. Did the UNSG/UN DESA look at the ITU, which has will.i.am as its AI Skills Coalition Goodwill Ambassador & decide IGF needed its own famous face from the USA to brand the forum? Do we have a war underway between UN agencies laying claim to famous American people?

We are thrilled to welcome actor and filmmaker Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the UN’s first Global Advocate for Human-centric Digital Governance.

In this role, @hitrecordjoe will collaborate with the #UnitedNations to help shape a digital future that is inclusive, innovative and human-centred. He will bring his creativity, perspective and influence to the UN Internet Governance Forum, amplifying the UN’s commitment to human rights and accountability in the digital age.

From online safety to access and opportunity, his advocacy will help ensure that the human impact of technology on everyday life is never overlooked.

We are excited to have Joseph Gordon-Levitt join the UN family and to work together on this vital mission.

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Mar 7

With the #ICANN85 GAC (Governmental Advisory Committee) making full use of a human-generated transcript, it avoids the many bizarre clangers that Zoom AI captions tend to generate, so well worth checking it out. A reminder on how to get back to the start of a live transcript session:

Instructions on how to load a live transcript back to the start of the transcript session:

If the base URL is "https://www.streamtext.net/player?event=NAME":

- Add " "/transcript" after "player" but before "?" to produce

https://www.streamtext.net/player/transcript?event=NAME

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Mar 2

Russian delegation includes a pussy bow wearing woman at the UNSC session being chaired by Melania Trump. Coincidence?

Russia speaking at the United Nations Security Council session being chaired by Melania Trump, with one of their female delegates wearing a top with a pussy bow.

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Mar 1

"Extremely high capital requirements for developing LLMs make [AI governance] multistakeholderism even more fragile than it was in the case of the internet: without billions of $ in processing power, data & talent, there's simply no way to sit at the table as an equal" circleid.com/posts/ai-the...

Unilateral governance

But perhaps the most consequential—and most revealing—choice in the declaration is institutional in nature. The document strips the United Nations of central responsibility for AI governance and places its bets on the multi-stakeholder model, that is, a governance shared among states, companies, and other non-state actors, without any clear hierarchy of responsibilities and with decisions made by consensus. This is not a neutral choice: it is precisely the model that shaped internet governance over the past few decades, with results that historical experience itself allows us to assess.

ICANN, the internet’s principal technical coordination body, was born with the rhetoric of multi-stakeholderism and produced, in practice, a progressive corporate capture, marked by a lack of transparency and control by a single power. The transition from North American state oversight to this model did not represent a victory for globalism, but the replacement of state control with control by the United States’ major technology companies. New domains were sold at prohibitive prices; civil society was treated as a decorative layer; accountability mechanisms proved largely performative; and nation-states have no active voice in its decisions. The result was the consolidation of an internet whose logical, economic, and infrastructural layers remain under the unilateral control of a small group of countries and corporations.

For AI, the risk is analogous and potentially more serious. The extremely high capital requirements for developing large language models make multi-stakeholderism even more fragile than it was in the case of the internet: without billions of dollars in processing power, data, and talent, there is simply no way to sit at the table as an equal. The model proposed by the declaration thus paves the way for bilateral governance between Big Tech and major states—with the Global South reduced to the role of consumer and data supplier. The so-called AI Summits risk repeating the trajectory of the WSIS—the World Summit on the Information Society—a process created in 2003 that dragged on for decades of rhetorical stalemate without any concrete results in terms of redistributing power over digital infrastructure.

The choice between multilateralism and multi-stakeholderism is not technical; it is political. Multilateralism, for all its flaws, anchors responsibilities in sovereign states and preserves the possibility of binding mechanisms negotiated under conditions of formal equality. Multi-stakeholderism, as the history of the internet has demonstrated, tends to dilute that formal equality into real asymmetries—where the weight of each actor depends less on its democratic mandate and more on its economic and technological power.

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Mar 1

For anyone flying to #ICANN85 in Mumbai & checking the ICANN homepage obsessively to see if there's updated travel advice but only seeing the big news item that predates the Iran bombing, there's actually updated advice. You just have to scroll down, click "More announcements", then "Travel Alert".

Screenshot of ICANN website - icann.org - homepage, advising users to ignore the big news item on travel avice for ICANN85, and choose the "More announcements" link, instead, to find the most recent travel advice on ICANN85.

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Feb 16

"Over the last 2 decades, Brazil has become something of an emblem of the global battle for digital sovereignty." But not so much now, it seems. tribunemag.co.uk/2026/02/is-b...

But even if we disregard the recent events that led to Brazil partially sidelining its commitment to digital sovereignty, can we really consider this country to be a successful case of struggle against the ever-growing big tech appetite for monopoly building and deregulation? According to a study produced in a joint venture by the Universities of São Paulo and Brasília, local and federal administrations in Brazil have paid over R$ 23 billion (Brazilian Reais) in big tech software licenses (nearly half of that money spent in the twelve months between June 2024 and June 2025). Such an amount would be enough not only to develop Brazil’s own national software landscape, but also to power it with eighty-six high-end locally built data centres 5MW Tier 3, raising in fifty percent, with public infrastructure, the current number of such facilities — which, by the way, are all private. Unfortunately, as already mentioned, Lula’s government chose the opposite path and instead of creating a national infrastructure that could potentially secure Brazilian people’s data sovereignty, signed a bill that will grant fiscal advantages for big techs to build, operate and own their own data centres on Brazilian soil, while keeping their ownership of the data.

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Feb 15

So coffee is getting more expensive due to climate change. (Entire communities are gradually disappearing under water... priorities!) But this para left me stunned that anyone could drink what's basically liquefied coffee ice-cream daily for years & admit it! www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a...

Her daily routine once involved a McDonald’s coffee (10 sugars, five creams), later transitioning to Starbucks caramel macchiatos with almond milk and two pumps of syrup.

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Feb 14

Sometimes it’s good just to step away from digital policy & geopolitics & instead take some time to watch a Digger Bee (Amegilla genus) grooming after rain.

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Feb 1

While the French govt's moves to a sovereign tech platform, Suite Numérique, this Guardian article demonstrates the flip side of the coin - that national digital infrastructure can be used to spy on & control citizens using it: www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

A feature of the national internet is domestic messaging apps, which Iranian authorities have energetically promoted over the past years, and which include Gap. Several separate Iranian digital rights experts said the point of these apps was to shepherd users on to platforms the regime could monitor.

“The overall point is control. Local platforms make it easier to monitor conversations, collect data, and silence dissidents, without the legal and technical barriers that exist for global services,” said a researcher at Outline Foundation, an anti-censorship organisation. “This isn’t about boosting local innovation. It’s about consolidating surveillance and shrinking the space for independent expression.”

Gap boasts more than 1m downloads on Google’s Play store, and 4m more on Cafe Bazaar, an Iranian app store. It offers a built-in payment service, as well as games, online calls and animal-themed stickers.

FilterWatch’s report concluded that Gap Messenger appeared to have at least once handed over information on its users to Iranian censorship authorities, according to emails leaked from the attorney general’s office in late 2022.

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Oct 25

#ICANN84 GAC is spending this afternoon in Dublin discussing the next round of #newgTLD applications. It's a packed agenda.

Agenda:
1. Welcome and Introduction
2. Readiness Plan
3. Additional Outreach to Governments
4. The Applicant Journey
• Applicant Journey Overview
• Submission to Prioritization Draw
• Community Input, Objections, and Appeals
• String Evaluations
• Contention and its Resolution
• Application Evaluations
• Applicant Evaluations
• Contracting
5. Dive In: PICs, RVCs, and Community Registration Policies

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Oct 25

And as #ICANN84 is now underway, it's time for my regular meeting reminder about how to get the live transcript back to the start of a session if you happen to come late into a session:

https://www.streamtext.net/player?event=EVENTNAME

Add “/transcript” to create:

https://www.streamtext.net/player/transcript?event=EVENTNAME

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Aug 27

When you accidentally stumble upon an echidna that then thinks that dashing into the shed & hiding under the lawn mower is a good idea! I’ll check in the morning to make sure it’s not stuck.

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Jul 10

#UNcyberOEWG Chair: thanks to UN financial austerity measures, this WG cannot go beyond 6 pm Friday. (Note: I'm attaching a screenshot from yesterday's discussions, where you can see the chairs in UN headquarters are literally falling apart because there have long been lack of funds to fix them)

Image of leather chairs at UN headquarters coming apart thanks to lack of funds to fix them.

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Jul 9

Elvis has entered the (UN) building thanks to an intervention by the German Council on Foreign Relations at the #UNCyberOEWG

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Jun 29

I stumbled upon this little family this afternoon. A mother Pacific Black Duck and 8 ducklings! A reminder that it's winter here in Brisbane. She's either a first time (confused) mother, or climate change is totally disrupting her breeding cycle. Or possibly both.

Pacific Black Duck mother with her eight very young ducklings beside her in the grass.

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Jun 28

I don't own chickens. And yet, here are two chickens! Hoping they find their way to where ever home is and they don't come back. There's already enough earth excavations happening here thanks to the brush turkeys and bandicoots.

Two brown hens in the shade, standing on dirt, with plants behind them, looking at the camera.

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Jun 27

It's the last day of #IGF2025 in Lillestrøm, & here in Brisbane, it's now dark enough for my friendly garage possum, Olga, to wake up & think about going out to forage for the night. Remote participation means I still get to hang with local cuties like this every day before the meeting starts!

Brushtail Possum poking its head out of its wooden sleeping box.

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Jun 24

If, like me, you can't get into the Plenary Hall Zoom Room for the #IGF2025 opening ceremony, the YouTube livestream is working: www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6yZ...

Screenshot of Zoom room being unavailable due to another meeting in progress

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Jun 12

The #ICANN83 GAC Communique has been put to bed! There is only one piece of consensus advice, regarding DNS abuse. There will now be a 72-hour review period before the Communique is published officially.

V. GAC Consensus Advice to ICANN Board

The following items of advice from the GAC to the Board have been reached on the basis of consensus as defined in the ICANN Bylaws:

1. Policy Development Related to DNS Abuse

a. The GAC advises the Board:

To urge the GNSO Council to undertake all necessary preparations prior to ICANN84 towards starting targeted and narrowly scoped Policy Development Processes (PDPs) on DNS Abuse issues, prioritizing bulk registration of malicious domain names and the responsibility of registrars to investigate domains associated with registrant accounts that are the subject of actionable reports of DNS Abuse.

RATIONALE

Before new strings are added to the DNS as a result of the next round, further work on DNS Abuse is needed to stem the increasing cost to the public of phishing, malware, botnets, and other forms of DNS abuse. Furthermore, the GAC encourages PDPs that are targeted and clearly scoped to achieve results according to shorter timelines.

The GAC appreciates the wealth of proposals for further policy work recently expressed by different parts of the community and maintains they all deserve attention. The GAC supports multistakeholder action to achieve Consensus Policy outcomes and encourages, for the time being, prioritization of specific issues such as malicious use of bulk registrations.

Given this timeline, the GAC encourages progress on commencing narrowly-scoped PDPs between ICANN83 and ICANN84.

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Jun 12

Draft of proposed #ICANN83 GAC Consensus Advice on Policy Development on DNS Abuse currently being looked at by the GAC. This is the first time most GAC members have seen this text (deadline for text submission was only 29 minutes ago), so GAC members still trying to get their heads around the text.

[Topic Leads: EC, JP, US]

1. Policy Development

a. The GAC advises the Board:

To direct the GNSO Council to develop and publish an issues report, prior to
ICANN84, addressing the following: the bulk registration of malicious domain names; and the ability of registrars to investigate domains associated with registrant accounts that are the subject of actionable reports of DNS Abuse.

RATIONALE
Before new strings are added to the DNS as a result of the next round, further work on DNS Abuse is needed to stem the increasing cost to the public of phishing, malware, botnets, and other forms of DNS abuse. Further, the GAC strongly supports a significant shift and "step-change" in how PDPs are conducted at ICANN and encourages policy work that is targeted and clearly scoped to achieve results according to shorter timelines.

The GAC appreciates the wealth of proposals for further policy work recently expressed by different parts of the community and maintains they all deserve attention. The GAC supports multistakeholder action to achieve Consensus Policy outcomes and encourages, for the time being, prioritization of specific issues such as malicious use of bulk registrations.

Given this timeline, the GAC encourages progress on commencing narrowly-scoped PDPs between ICANN83 and ICANN84.

S G Dickinson@sgdickinson· Jun 12

Deadline for proposed topics for #ICANN83 GAC communique closed at 9 am Prague time today. This is the list of topics now included for the communique drafting today: