Sally Wentworth was a guest of the TechSequences podcast on 7 January 2026. Below is a transcript from the conversation Sally had with Alexa Raad and Leslie Daigle. Her specific commentary is in bold text.
The name of our podcast, TechSequences, is really a mashup of two words: technology and consequences. We are fascinated by the consequences, intended or unintended, of the Internet and related technologies for the way we live, play, and work.
We are your hosts, Leslie Daigle and Alexa Raad. We started our careers at the dawn of the Internet and have been friends, colleagues, and comrades in arms for the better part of 20 years.
In this podcast, we examine the impact Internet-related technologies have made or may make in our lives.
I am Alexa Raad. And I’m Leslie Daigle. Welcome to TechSequences.
It is easy to know a film’s historical setting the moment a character reaches for a landline or unfurls a physical map. The absence of pervasive connectivity marks a bygone era. Today, always-on electronic devices and the Internet that binds them are simply a given in our daily existence.
Because of this integration, we inherently assume the Internet is a resilient, invisible utility that efficiently connects people and devices across the globe. But that fundamental assumption of a single, unified, open platform is now under threat by converging forces determined to fragment its core architecture, actively creating a digital landscape defined by national borders and critical technical choke points.
We are facing a dual crisis: threats coming simultaneously from policy overreach and technical mandates. The crisis begins with policy overreach driven by rising nationalism, political imperatives, and a powerful response to perceived global imbalance. Governments are aggressively pushing for digital sovereignty.
This involves enacting laws that mandate data must be stored and processed entirely within national borders. This policy shifts compromise the network’s global efficiency and security. We see this push manifest differently across the globe. Russia, for instance, recently blocked Snapchat and imposed restrictions on Apple’s FaceTime, demanding that communication services grant security access for monitoring.
Similarly, China enforces technical and legal walls through its cybersecurity law, mandating data localization and effectively isolating data within its borders. At the same time, the European Union achieved sovereignty through regulatory means such as the GDPR, making cross-border data transfers legally complex.
This means the plates of international politics are actively shifting, threatening to carve up the network in favor of geopolitical advantage and nationalistic self-interest. This political fragmentation recently culminated in a dramatic conclusion at the United Nations. For a while, it seemed as if, for the first time in 20 years, governments at the World Summit on the Information Society, also known as WSIS, would fail to reach consensus.
It was just only recently, on December 17th, that they finally reached agreement on a document to reaffirm the original WSIS goals. The hard-fought battle signals a noteworthy escalation in the global fight over Internet governance, a battle in which some nations seek to rest control away from the established multi-stakeholder model involving engineers and civil society towards purely intergovernmental, multilateral bodies.
In other words, the core principles of openness, decentralization, and interoperability are under threat. However, the threat is equally severe on the technical and operational front. The Internet relies on the border gateway protocol, BGP, an unauthenticated system that functions as the Internet’s global GPS, routing traffic solely on trust.
When states enforce sovereignty through technical means, they intentionally abuse this trust. For example, countries have deliberately inserted false information into their routing tables, the maps that tell the Internet where to send traffic, to isolate, redirect, or censor large swaths of the web. This is not theoretical.
In a more recent and direct escalation, the frequency of deliberate Internet shutdowns has skyrocketed, with nearly 300 incidents tracked globally in 2024 alone. In September, the Taliban government mandated a total blackout in Afghanistan, cutting emergency communications for communities reeling from a major earthquake and grounding essential services.
From Tanzania to Cameroon, authorities are increasingly treating the Internet not as a global utility, but as a switch to be toggled during unrest or elections. This growing trend of state-mandated outages turns the network’s centralized infrastructure into a tool for control, effectively silencing entire societies and concealing human rights abuses.
Even well-intentioned national legislation can have unintended and sometimes difficult technical consequences. Consider the recent Australian social media minimum age ban. This law requires platforms to implement robust, audible age verification for users under 16.
The critical difficulty is a privacy paradox, forcing platforms to collect highly sensitive data, such as government IDs or biometrics, for compliance, while simultaneously mandating a strict ringfence and destroy protocol to prevent that verification data from being used for advertising or leaking into the platform’s broader data system. Accommodating these complex global identity checks fragments the user experience and compromises privacy for everyone involved.
The stakes are immense. At risk is the future of the multistakeholder model, the core principle that keeps the Internet open.
The converging pressures of localization, political governance, fights, and dangerous technical mandates threaten to create a slow, expensive, and insecure splinternet. What are the consequences of this digital fragmentation? How does the failure of consensus at the UN change the way that nations engage on global Internet topics? And what can be done to ensure that the Internet’s global decentralized principles survive these converging threats?
Our guest today is Sally Wentworth. Sally is the president and CEO of the Internet Society and the Internet Society Foundation, where she leads global efforts to ensure the Internet is affordable, resilient, secure, and a force for social and economic development worldwide.
Since joining the organization in 2009, she has focused on building coalitions amongst diverse stakeholders, bridging the gap between Internet technical experts and policy makers, and championing the Internet’s transformative potential to improve lives and create opportunities in communities around the world.
Prior to the Internet Society, she served as assistant director for telecommunications and information policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where she coordinated Internet policy issues and advised senior officials on matters including Internet governance, cybersecurity, and telecommunications policy.
Welcome, Sally.
Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here today.
So just to start, for our listeners who may not be so familiar with the organization, could you introduce the Internet Society? When was it founded? What’s its core mission? That sort of thing.
Sure. The Internet Society is a global, international nonprofit or charity, dedicated to a vision that the Internet is for everyone.
We were formed in 1992 by two of the sort of so-called fathers of the Internet, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, essentially to be the home of the Internet Engineering Task Force, which is the open standards body that drives the development of standards for the future, and to be a voice for the growth and scalability of the Internet worldwide.
And those two purposes of the Internet Society back in 1992 still form the core of who we are today. We’ve changed, of course, in the last 30 years, but fundamental to us is this belief that the Internet should be open, globally connected, secure, and trustworthy for everyone.
So, in that context and in the context of the opening remarks that Alexa read, can you explain what the multistakeholder model of governance is and how it works and why it’s preferable to a top-down, meaning a government-initiated, governance?
The multistakeholder model is really about the mechanisms that can be used to bring all of the impacted stakeholders, the voices of those stakeholders, to the table when making decisions, driving towards an outcome. And in the environment of the Internet and the way the Internet was really formed and developed in its earliest stages, that’s really what happened. Even back when the Internet was a research network, it was about testing ideas among different stakeholders in the networking space to see what protocols would work, what would be successful, what were the new challenges as the networks were scaling and growing.
And that model, that idea that you get the right expertise at the table to solve hard problems, to test and try things out, was really the formative model for the Internet, all the way back to its earliest days. As the Internet developed and as different organizations emerged to manage some of the critical resources that we all depend upon in the Internet, whether that’s the Domain Name System, or IP addressing, or even the standards themselves at the IETF, they relied on those models to do that important work.
Let’s make sure that the communities that are impacted by the decisions we make have a voice in how those decisions are made and what the content of the policies might be. And that model, in contrast to sort of that top-down government model, enables a robustness and a resilience to the decisions that come forward from the multistakeholder model. You’re taking in a lot of input, you’re testing things, you have a lot of agility in the ability to make modifications or scale a particular protocol or service that you’re trying to build. In a top-down environment, it tends to be very closed. There’s a single decision maker. They may consult, you know, some people, but they don’t have an obligation to consult widely.
The decisions can be quite brittle and difficult to change. You don’t get all the best minds and best voices in the room necessarily. And so it doesn’t produce the kind of robust outcomes that we see through the multistakeholder model.
So, for those of the audience who do not know what the World Summit of the Information Society, or WSIS, is, can you explain what it is and why is it important or why does it even matter for global Internet governance?
And talk about what the, what all the drama was about just recently.
So, the World Summit of the Information Society was actually a UN summit that took place in 2003 and 2005. And if you go back in your mind to that era, and you know, the Internet was certainly being deployed, you know, increasingly around the world, but it was not widely deployed and we didn’t have the kind of robust digital economy that we have today.
Many of the large platforms that we’re so used to interacting with didn’t even exist back then. But governments were beginning at that time to grapple with the implications of the Internet for their societies. What did this all mean for human rights, for economic opportunity, for security, for diversity, for marginalized groups, for governance? And they were grappling with that at the policy level, at the United Nations level, for really the very first time.
And they reached a consensus on an output document that actually recognized that this multistakeholder model that we just discussed a few minutes ago was the appropriate way to govern the Internet into the future, that getting all these stakeholders to the table was important, and governments really fought over that, they weren’t sure. This was not the way they were used to making decisions. This was, you know, a little bit scary at times and yet, what they wanted was…
You were the first one, right?
I was, yeah.
Yeah.
I was working at the State Department when this was first negotiated. And so it was hard, it was hard for all the governments, and they agreed to this form of governance, and they agreed to the creation of the Internet Governance Forum as a venue to debate and discuss kind of the future of the Internet and how it would roll out around the world.
As part of the WSIS and as part of most UN summits, there’s a review period, so every 10 years they review the progress of the globe, essentially, against the commitments that were made at the summit.
And so over the last week or so, it’s been the culmination of really a year-long review within the UN of the progress that’s been made in achieving the WSIS targets over the last 20 years. And, you know, it was dramatic, and I think it’s always been the case. I think the original WSIS was also dramatic. People weren’t sure if there’d be consensus.
But this time the, you know, the role of digital technologies in society is increasingly well understood. There’s a certain degree of fear, there is a sense of some countries feeling excluded from the opportunities that the Internet and digital technologies provide, and questions about whether what got us here over the last 20 years was what would take us forward into the future.
So the last, really, probably seven to 10 days has been a pretty difficult negotiation among mostly member states. Those of us who are stakeholders get to kind of observe from the outside, but we’re not making these decisions.
And ultimately, to, you know, our happiness, they did adopt a consensus document that continues to recognize the multistakeholder model as the appropriate way to govern the Internet. It does reaffirm support for a permanent Internet Governance Forum going forward. But it also reaffirms the global community’s commitments to digital inclusion, bridging the digital divide, ensuring that everybody benefits from the Internet going forward.
Putting a point on some of the kinds of things that can happen if countries do sort of go unilateral in their attempt to control things, in 2011, facing civil unrest, Egypt unplugged itself from the Internet and then turned off the Internet within Egypt.
So, by forcing their service providers to unplug from the rest of the world, now that had some pretty significant implications, not just for organizations within Egypt, but also ones in other countries whose backup or other critical services, for instance, were hosted in Egypt.
Right.
So, what kind of, you know, political manipulation of Internet resources, what does that really mean for real-world national relations, and how does that play into the mix here?
Well, I think as the Internet and as digital technologies deepen their impact in societies and in economies, it’s in some ways natural for governments to say, well, we should have some say in how this happens in our country. And so you see them—I don’t think this is particularly new, but I do think that the strength of the movement seems to be growing—you do see this kind of natural response to say, we want some sense of control here, and we’re gonna try to find those levers of control. And the difficulty, and I think the Egypt example is a great example of how that impulse to control, and sometimes in that case, in this specific case, to shut down, the policymakers don’t always understand how that has spillover effects beyond their borders.
What’s not always clear to governments is that unlike your electrical grids or your road systems or other systems, the Internet is not designed or bound by nation-state borders, right? The routing tables and the way traffic moves around the globe is not, you know, carved up neatly along national lines.
And so, the decisions that a government makes, sometimes very well-intentioned and sometimes not, can spill over to impacts on countries, you know, all around the globe, and they don’t even realize that’s what they’re about to do.
So you’ve mentioned consensus a couple of times, and the multistakeholder model being about collaboration amongst various stakeholders who may be diametrically opposed.
This multistakeholder model assumes somewhat equitable influence, but today power is concentrated in big tech. That wasn’t the case in, you know, 2003.
Right
And not only just big tech, but a few big sovereign nations. So how does the Internet Society, which is US-based, it’s a not-for-profit organization representative of IETF, which are engineers and civil society, how does it maintain relevance and leverage to influence this global policy debate and technical standards when the biggest decisions are often made behind closed doors by tech giants and powerful sovereign states?
Yeah, it’s a really good question.
You know, I think for us, the results over the last three decades do speak for themselves. The Internet and, well, the Internet and the networks that are all interconnecting around the world, that underpin the digital economy, have scaled and have proven to be incredibly resilient. And those depend upon the open standards that are developed by the IETF. And that has been proven time and time again that that model is effective. And so, it’s incumbent upon us to continue to articulate that at every opportunity. And I think we’re not alone in the Internet technical community, we all have to do that constantly to say, we are here working not on behalf of any one company or any one government. We are here because we believe that the global Internet can be a force for good in the world, and that it needs to be robust, resilient, secure, trusted for everyone. And that is what really drives our work.
We are not beholden to any one company or any one government, and we work very hard to maintain that independence. The work that we do spans the globe. We at the Internet Society are deeply committed to connectivity, to connecting the hardest-to-reach people all around the world. And we back that up with our programs, with our grant programs, our resourcing, the partners that we develop, the work on the ground that we execute, and the community that we support.
We have over 130 chapters at the Internet Society all over the globe that are local volunteers who care about this mission. And they care about the mission of the organization and they are impactful. We have seen examples of, there was a shutdown in Africa earlier this year that was supposed to be 30 days and the local chapter, you know, mobilized itself, they spoke up, they leveraged the data that we had, and that shutdown went from 30 days to five days.
So, the voices, the local voices within the Internet Society community can be incredibly valuable. And we come from a position of credibility and strength, oftentimes because, over the last 30 years, we have demonstrated time and time again that we will build and support and contribute to a robust and resilient Internet all around the world.
Yeah, I think the story of the Internet Society’s chapters is, it’s an, obviously it’s an important one, but I think it’s also interesting as we’re talking about the evolution of things and how things are different now than 20 or 30 years ago.
Hmm.
Where 20 and 30 years ago it was, you know, a lot of it was how to empower people to build networks in their spaces, which is still an important aspect. But what you’re describing now is the importance of really mobilizing in a multistakeholder fashion to affect change at a national level. So, I think there’s probably more that our listeners would love to hear about how the chapters are working.
Our chapters are, I think, our differentiator for the Internet Society, and they’re all very, very different. They have different interests, different expertise. That’s what happens with local volunteers, which I think is a strength of our community.
There’s real power in that diversity of expertise spanning across the globe. And increasingly, you’re right, our chapters are, they continue to do that work of building networks and building infrastructure and contributing to the Internet technical communities in their country, and they’re also well positioned to defend that infrastructure in the policy domain when they need to. And for us, that has been something we’ve been focusing a lot on for a number of years, but particularly this year, and trying to build out the advocacy capacity of the chapter communities where those volunteers want to do that.
This year, we held two community workshops purely focused on advocacy. We got hundreds and hundreds of applications. They went through online training. They were, then the smaller group was selected. And these were workshops of about 40 people for each workshop, one in Santiago, Chile, and one in Kuala Lumpur. And these were local, sometimes activists, advocates, people who believe passionately in our mission, who wanted to learn how to be more impactful advocates in their countries.
We did press training. We talked about how to write briefing papers, how to make a compelling case on a technical issue to a policy maker who doesn’t have time to listen to all the technology. You know, what are, what are all those skill sets that you need to have to be an impactful advocate in the country?
And it was, I met a group of them in Santiago, and they’re incredibly talented people. And you know, for those of us in a certain period in our careers, it’s really wonderful to see the next generation picking up this mantle and really in a position to carry it forward in some of the most difficult climates around the world.
I’m thinking back to, you know, 30 years ago, when the Internet was first born. It was the era of globalization, and globalization was really about, in a sense, vulnerability and collaboration, being able to rely on other people or other resources to get a larger mission going. And since then, the world has changed.
We are now seeing a lot of nationalistic sentiments, the Brexit, for example, America First.
Yeah.
The breakdown of traditional allies and relationships, but also the Internet itself has changed. Vint was recently a co-author on an interesting paper about the seven stages of the Internet.
And, you know, we’re also going to a point where there are more devices on the Internet than there are human beings. So, given that the political climate is very different, given that the Internet itself now is very different in terms of traffic, there’s a lot of traffic that is actually, it’s not just even human, it’s malicious traffic.
Mmm.
And you also have all of the issues that you talked about with the governments trying to exert control. Is that making ISOC’s mission harder to implement? And if so, what are you doing to ensure that ISOC is still going to be able to accomplish its core mission given all these challenges?
Yeah, it’s a very different world than the one that I began my career in. You know, if I think back to my early days as a diplomat in the original WSIS as we call it, you know, everybody wanted more of the Internet. That was really underpinning the negotiations.
It was like, this is new, we’re a little worried about it, but, you know, we ultimately think we want to be part of the information society. And I think that’s still largely true, but there’s fear now. I think there’s, you know, a lot of the challenges that you highlighted there.
For us, with all of that complexity, the thing that helps us is to remain focused. And we have in our 2030 strategy two strategic goals that we are focused on. You know, first, one, that people everywhere have access to affordable, reliable, and resilient Internet, and second, people everywhere have an Internet experience that’s safe, secure, and protects them online.
And this doesn’t mean that ISOC can’t be agile. This doesn’t mean that we aren’t paying attention to these trends and how they impact that mission. But it does allow us to stay laser-focused on what we think the Internet Society needs to be about to support a global Internet. And we need to be mindful of all of these factors that are happening out in the world.
But the very hard reality is, is that there are still 2.2 billion people who are not connected to the Internet. And if they remain unconnected to the Internet, the digital inequality, the global inequality that’s driving some of this nationalism and driving some of these political changes, will only deepen.
The onset and deployment of AI systems with tremendous, you know, computing power and, you know, the transformations that those can potentially make to our societies are going to leave people behind if we don’t continue to focus on this core issue of connectivity.
If people don’t feel safe using the technology and the dangers are outpacing users’ capacity to manage them, you have all sorts of social and political consequences that flow from those.
So that’s what the Internet Society remains really focused on, and we think that’s still relevant. Everybody has lots of new topics and there’s lots of, you know, attention being paid to those. But we still think there’s some fundamental core objectives that the Internet Society needs to achieve in order to contribute to a, you know, a more positive future.
And do you think that by focusing on those core directions and getting more people to focus with you, do you think it’s possible that, you know, WSIS+30 can be a little less dramatic and maybe a little bit more focused on core principles? Or do you think it’s just an ever-expanding world and complexity will ensue?
In my experience and, you know, more to my diplomatic experience, these kinds of conferences and events tend to absorb the tensions in the world wherever they find themselves. And that, I don’t think WSIS is any different than that. So, whatever is happening in the global political sphere will affect the next WSIS review, and we just need to understand that, as the Internet technical community, you know, we don’t get to put our head in the sand and sort of ignore what’s happening in the world around us.
And WSIS is often a moment where we all have to really grapple with that, you know, face head-on, right? You have to observe the world around you, you have to be mindful of what countries are saying, and that some of the conversations we’re already starting to have, you know, even though the ink isn’t hardly dry on the WSIS text, right now, within our team is, what did we hear? What were the governments saying? Because they are an important stakeholder.
We talk about multistakeholder. We often talk about governments as challenging, and it’s difficult to manage these political interests, but they are a stakeholder and we need to understand where they’re coming from, what are the challenges that they’re focused on, and then what is the role of the information or the Internet Society, and in this case, in trying to bridge some of those gaps. We can’t do it all. But where do we have a unique role to play?
But I would suspect in 10 years, there will be continued discussions about the role of technology in people’s lives and, you know, what they want that society to look like. And we’re going to have to be prepared to meet that.
Let’s talk a little bit about legislative actions now, because the Internet is under threat from multiple sources. You know, one is obviously policy overreach, technical mandates, but, you know, legislative actions that are well-intentioned often have technical consequences.
Right.
So, for example, in the US, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act was meant to combat trafficking.
But it resulted in platforms deleting huge amounts of legitimate content, you know, oftentimes content that was meant for, you know, educating, for example. So how does this law and similar laws demonstrate that imposing these legal mandates without technical consultation leads to more harm and a fragmented experience and safety.
This is a pretty common problem that we see in legislative efforts around the world. You know, we see this in the, I think, the age verification discussion happening. Seems like everywhere these days, data localization laws are similar, and you know, we try very hard to sit with governments who are willing to have a conversation, to try to talk about, you know, what are the kind of unintended consequences that may come from, as you said, a very, you know, relatively well-intentioned policy.
We have a toolkit, so to speak, that we try to use with governments, kind of like, you know, if you build a bridge, you do an environmental impact assessment, like, what are the implications for the local environment for this decision you’re about to make, to build this bridge? We think governments should do a similar exercise when it comes to making policy or legislation about the Internet. Okay, you wanna solve this important public interest challenge. Let’s walk through what the implications for the Internet might be of different approaches you might take to that.
You know, we get some pickup on that and not as much as I think we’d like, but there are some governments that have been willing to kind of sit down and work through that.
But I think the mindset approach is the one that we care the most about is, be interested in how the Internet works. Be interested in how the way the Internet works actually benefits you and your country and your society and your economy. And if you are interested in that, then let’s talk about this public interest challenge you have and what might be possible without undermining those benefits that you’ve now understood to be the case in your country.
That’s how we would like to see these conversations go. Unfortunately, what often happens is that the emotion of the issue, the cause, which may be very pure in some cases, tends to run away with the discussion and the technical implications are the ones that we then have to solve after the fact, and some of those can be really harmful and really, really impactful on people’s lives.
Yeah, and I think it’s a very difficult landscape because governments, you know, we talk about them as a government, as a stakeholder, as a group, but they’re very different.
Yes.
There are some governments that are very willing to work with you, and there’s some governments that really view the Internet as a means of societal control or…
Absolutely.
…going after their adversaries or identifying them. So, how do you deal with those governments who don’t necessarily share this vision of an open, interoperable Internet?
It’s hard. The place we try to start is with data. We try to show countries, and we have a tool called Pulse that is a measurement platform that we’ve stood up that kind of pulls in data from a lot of different sources and tries to paint a picture for a country or even a region on the state of the Internet in their country. And in some of those discussions, you almost take the politics and, you know, the emotion out of it, and I think most, many governments, I can’t say this for all governments, but many governments, you know, they can be competitive. They want to see their resiliency scores higher than their neighbor.
They want to see, you know, oh, look at how robust my infrastructure is, or look at how much progress I’m making on affordability. Or, you know, they don’t want to see their country in the red or something like that. And so, you can use data to open the door to a conversation about resiliency, for example, and about the importance of being able to provide emergency services during a disaster.
That crosses any border. Countries need to be able to do that and some decisions that they make make it harder for them to do that and lives can be lost as a result of that. So, you try to go in through the door that might be open. But when we’re in there, I want to be clear, I mean, ISOC has some core values and principles that we stand for and, you know, we don’t ever lose sight of that, regardless of the government that we might be speaking to.
Maybe by way of wrap-up, I can ask a broader question. Considering the convergent threats to sovereignty, commercial peering pressures, technically flawed mandates, all of the things that we’ve talked about today, if you could mandate one global action, technical or policy-based, to protect the future stability and openness of the Internet over the next five years, what would it be?
I think we have to stay committed to this multistakeholder model. It sounds, sometimes people say, oh, it just sounds like a lot of people getting together in a room and it’s just talking. You know, we had cause to think about it a bit over the weekend. Like, what if this consensus fell apart? Like what is, you start walking that forward into the future.
What does that mean for the stability and security of the Internet going forward? Would it all change January 1st? Probably not. Would you see a deterioration in the robustness and resilience of the infrastructure over time? Absolutely, you would.
I think this model is not about, you know, just feeling good. It’s really about getting the right voices at the table to solve hard problems. And when you do that, you get results that scale. You get results that are localized when that is needed. And you get an infrastructure that has proven incredibly resilient and scalable over the last, you know, 30 plus years.
Thank you so much for joining us.
You’re welcome. It was really fun to talk to you.
It was a pleasure. Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this TechSequences podcast. We are. Leslie Daigle and Alexa Raad. You can reach us by email: [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you to know what you thought about this episode or ideas for future episodes. TechSequences. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook and subscribe through your favorite podcasting service.