GNI’s 2022 Annual Report featured an exclusive interview with our new Executive Director Jason Pielemeier. Read the interview below and check out the full text of the Annual Report, Navigating a Shifting Digital Landscape.
In May 2022, the GNI Board unanimously appointed Jason Pielemeier, who previously served as GNI’s Deputy Director and Policy Director, as its new Executive Director. Jason became Executive Director at an exciting moment for the organization and will work to further grow and strengthen GNI, while enhancing its impact. This year, GNI conducted its fourth and largest assessment cycle, concluded a strategic review, and continues to welcome new members across all of its constituencies.
GNI Executive Director Jason Pielemeier
How has GNI evolved since you first joined in 2017?
The biggest change in GNI over the last six years has been its significant growth in membership. When I joined the organization in 2017, we were working alongside roughly three dozen members. While we had just welcomed a large number of telecom and equipment companies and initiated the first cohort of our pilot fellowship program with Majority World NGOs, the vast majority of our members were still based in North America and Europe.
Since then, our membership has increased almost threefold and currently comprises companies, organizations, and individuals representing a broad range of services and perspectives from every region of the world. While much of this growth has occurred in our NGO constituency, we have also added important, non-Western companies like Frontiir, Line Corporation, and MTN. This has expanded our understanding of, sensitivity to, and impact on regional and local levels. GNI has slowly but surely been able to actualize the “global” in our name, and this has been tremendously exciting to be part of.
Of course, growth can also create challenges — “growing pains,” as it were. Fortunately, our Board and my predecessor, Judith Lichtenberg, were wise to this and established a comprehensive Strategic Review process in 2021, which has helped us take stock of how we can evolve to better accommodate our growing membership and address the changing freedom of expression and privacy challenges of the digital age. This includes being more creative and deliberate about GNI’s focus and working methods, improving our efforts around membership engagement and inclusion, and proactively seeking to contribute to emerging regulatory frameworks that encourage responsible business conduct. It will also entail expanding our staff to acquire relevant expertise and build a truly international team capable of meeting our members where they are increasingly located.
GNI is in its second decade now. What are key lessons learned and how can that knowledge be translated into global efforts in an ever-changing regulatory environment?
From GNI’s inception, until somewhat recently, there was a rough consensus among the broader digital rights community that ICTs were at best rights-enhancing and at worst rights-neutral. This began to change in the mid-2010s as abuses of digital technologies by governments and controversies around company uses of data raised increasing concerns about the “misuse of tech.”
More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic provided a reminder of how useful — indeed critical — ICTs are for those that have the ability to access them, while underscoring remaining connectivity disparities. Over this same period, we also witnessed increasing geopolitical tensions related to the growing influence of China, as well as an uptick in civil and interstate armed conflict.
The net result of these trends for the ICT sector is that we have entered a period of intense regulatory activity with more governments pushing forward efforts to control the deployment, use, and oversight of these technologies. There is no doubt that the most significant legislative development in the sector to date is the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which was introduced in December 2020 and approved in October 2022. The DSA is a pivotal piece of legislation that will have direct impacts on companies doing business in Europe, and presages a broader shift in how digital content is likely to be governed globally. It also represents the most significant regulatory effort that explicitly attempts to regulate the sector in a rightsrespecting manner, which is a key reason why GNI has been generally supportive of it and continues to work closely on its ongoing implementation.
In sum, recent events have underscored both the critical role of ICTs and the importance of human rights as a framework for fostering global cooperation and responsible business conduct. As the world’s largest and most significant multistakeholder initiative working to foster respect for human rights, GNI is incredibly well positioned to continue shaping both mandatory and voluntary efforts to ensure collective collaboration toward a more rights-respecting ICT sector
In your opinion, what is the role that GNI plays within the broader ecosystem of accountability in the ICT sector as a multistakeholder initiative and how does it complement public regulation?
Regulatory developments in the European Union and elsewhere are reinforcing and accelerating many of the steps that leading ICT companies have already taken to improve corporate governance. GNI has been actively working to endorse and foster multistakeholder collaboration as a critical means for designing, implementing, and ensuring that this shift from voluntary to mandatory regulation results in a floor of good practice, rather than a ceiling that reduces responsible business conduct to a lowest-common-denominator compliancefocused checklist. We have spent the last fifteen years systematically identifying lessons and generating crossstakeholder consensus around key good practices that are present in these emerging regulatory approaches, such as transparency reporting, risk assessment and mitigation, auditor accreditation and training, and stakeholder engagement, so we have a lot of experience and insight to share!
The emergence of mandatory risk assessment and due diligence audits and reporting creates the potential for both synergy and overlap with the GNI assessment process. Realizing the implications of this regulatory shift on our work, we are considering potential overlaps and gaps between those obligations and GNI’s assessment process. This year, we issued a request for proposals to research opportunities for synchronizing GNI assessments with mandatory risk assessment/due diligence activities, and we look forward to that research helping inform how we may want to evolve GNI assessment to ensure it continues to add unique value to our members and the general public.
It is an exciting time for GNI; we’re growing but also learning and adapting!