- The report argues that the United States could lose the digital future through authoritarian domination of digital infrastructure or through broader global abandonment of digital principles rooted in free speech, human rights, and privacy.
- The PRC is presented as both a pole and catalyst for digital repression trends, promoting cyber sovereignty, building a parallel digital reality, and offering ideological support for fragmented national internets.
- ICT companies are described as central but vulnerable actors because governments can pressure them to censor content, block access, hand over data, or amplify pro-government messaging within sovereign borders.
- The report finds that statements of digital freedom principles, including the Declaration for the Future of the Internet, clarify what should be defended but do not by themselves explain how defense should occur.
- SCSP recommends that the U.S. government integrate digital freedom into a broader strategic framework that brings together democracy, human rights, trade, sanctions, commercial, technology, and regional policy tools consistent with wider competition priorities.
The Foreign Policy Panel Interim Panel Report is the fifth of six interim reports from SCSP’s broader work summarized in its Mid-Decade Challenges to National Competitiveness report. It argues that digital freedom is a strategic technology priority in a wider competition between open, democratic societies and closed, authoritarian systems, particularly in light of the PRC’s vision of cyber sovereignty and efforts to shape digital infrastructure and norms. The report states that it benefited from outside insights but was prepared by SCSP staff and is not a consensus document. Its scope is explicitly limited: it does not cover the full range of digital freedom issues, but focuses on resisting digital repression and defending an open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, and secure digital world. The report identifies growing threats including Internet shutdowns, censorship, surveillance, pressure on ICT companies, compelled data access, and state-backed disinformation. It recommends stronger U.S. government integration of digital freedom into strategic policy, greater public-private alignment, and a multi-stakeholder approach involving governments, ICT companies, and civil society organizations. Its notional playbook draws lessons from Ukraine on continuity, connectivity, e-government, cybersecurity, and information integrity, and proposes responses to government-directed repression including diplomacy, circumvention technologies, sanctions guidance, transparency, coordinated platform responses, and legal challenges.
You can’t destroy cloud with a missile.
Mykhailo Fedorov
- Ensure the digital continuity of states under threat. Have an emergency plan to back up data in a crisis, and enable backup of government data outside of the area of conflict.
- Maintain connectivity with redundant and/or alternative connectivity. Provide assistance around the world to support alternative means of maintaining Internet communications and connectivity.
- Strengthen diplomatic advocacy against the spectrum of digital freedom threats. A publicly-declared policy can help make clear how, where, when, and what the USG is ready to do regarding digital freedom.
- Prioritize and increase funding of on-the-ground circumvention capacity. Support novel connection hardware and traditional tools like VPNs and mesh networks for nations at risk of digital repression.
Published by the Special Competitive Studies Project. Co-publishers and external authors, where they exist, are credited in the byline above.