The importance of fundamental rights in a digital world

Toespraak | 01-06-2018

Welcome to you all. Welcome to the ‘City of Law and Peace’. Here, legal judgements are passed aimed at securing international peace. The law on which those judgements are based can be traced all the way back to our own 16th century Hugo de Groot or Grotius.

Every Dutch schoolboy and schoolgirl is taught that Grotius once hid from persecution, in a book chest. This image appeals so much to the imagination that researchers have even investigated the question of which book Grotius used as a headrest.

His book on maritime law Mare liberum was already famous but the book he wrote later ‘on the law of war and peace’ was to become even more celebrated.

The most remarkable feature of his work was its ability to bring order to chaos. Grotius was a true system thinker. A man with an ordered mind.

Ladies and gentlemen, in today’s world, we could well do with some of that order. Whereas Grotius focused his attention during the late Middle Ages on regulating the rules of sailing on the sea, we today face the challenge of regulating surfing on the Internet.

It is for that reason that we have all come together here, today. However, that does not necessarily mean that we will immediately go in search of answers to the question ‘how do we intend to go about it?’.

After all, taking that approach would eradicate any possibility of discussion.

What we will be hoping to do over the next few days is to reach consensus on how we can discuss the subject. What do we feel needs to be regulated? And what do we have in common?

Ladies and gentlemen.

Let me start with two examples of what can go wrong on the Internet.

A manufacturer of sports shoes ….

… posted a photograph on social media sites. The photograph also features a thick, greasy hair. Most of the people who saw the photograph thought ‘Yuck! there’s a hair on my mobile telephone. Let me quickly wipe it away’.

The only thing is, the hair is not a hair. The swiped-over ‘hair’ takes you directly to the website of the shoe manufacturer. And that increases the manufacturer’s chances of selling the sports shoes.

Is this an example of smart marketing or is it ethically unacceptable?

Example 2: the Blue Whale Game.

In India, last year, a number of young people committed suicide. The thing they had in common was the Blue Whale Game.

On the basis of online profiling, the young people in question were invited to ‘play’ this game. To be eligible you had a. to be pumped full of adrenaline and b. to have been considering suicide.

Candidates who satisfied these criteria received an invitation.

Step 1 in the game is ‘make a small cut in your wrist and post an online message that you have done so’; the final step is ‘climb the highest building in your city and jump off’….

… the game was located on a server in Russia. And therein was the problem. There was no way of accessing it in India …

Ladies and gentlemen.

These two examples help clarify the urgent necessity of this conference. Those same two questions, however, also raise questions as to what action should be taken to deal with them, how the action in question should be organised, and how it should subsequently be enforced.

In brief, it is a question of accountability.

And that is the issue that has brought us together today.

So what is accountability…

Depending on who you talk to, you could receive one of many different answers.

In discussing these issues we are very much at the interface between ‘we’re going to regulate everything and above all keep a close eye on everyone’ and ‘we want to uphold every possible freedom, and everyone can do whatever the hell they want to’.

You can’t want both. But somewhere between the two there must be consensus.

And if you want consensus, then any discussion will have to be multinational and multi stakeholder.

It will also mean including industry. And civil society. And government. After all., when you start considering issues of this kind, at the end of the day, you always come back to legislation and regulation, based eventually on what we all together consider decent, honest and reasonable.

And that is exactly what we will be doing today. All of us. Together. With a whole raft of different stakeholders.

And that is what makes this conference so unique.

Let there be no confusion as to my appeal to you in attending this conference.

Today we live in a fundamentally different era than that of the sailing ships of Hugo de Groot. An era of networks. An era in which every day, 4 billion people can be found online. I would therefore invite you to organise accountability within that global network. It is my heartfelt wish that by recognising the urgent need for this discussion, we will help wipe out the differences in culture, governance and funding.

In closing, I would like to once again bring to mind Hugo de Groot. In the late Middle Ages, Hugo Grotius was called upon by the trading industry to lay down a set of rules. Those rules eventually resulted in:

Safe and open seas.

Now, four hundred years later, we have been asked to contribute our thoughts to how accountability can be regulated, on the Internet.

Let us together hope that the eventual result will be:

A safe and open Internet.  
 

Ladies and gentlemen, I wish you all an interesting, fruitful and enjoyable day.