White paper/report

Five AIMS: Lessons from Internet Governance for Artificial Intelligence Management Strategies

Sciences Po Tech & Global Affairs Innovation Hub

2025

Co-authors: Wendy Hall, Pierre Noro

Themes: Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Category: Open access, White paper/report

To help scaffold coherent, coordinated, and enforceable rules and institutions, Dame Wendy Hall, Kieron O’Hara, and Pierre Noro reinterpret the Four Internet models elaborated by Hall and O’Hara in their influential book Four Internets: Data, Geopolitics, and the Governance of Cyberspace in regard to AI technologies. This translation, grounded in an analysis of the historical, socio-economic, and ideological differences distinguishing the context that shaped Internet governance and the current one, yields many enlightening insights and is the foundation of five Artificial Intelligence Management Strategies (AIMS). With many illustrations to exemplify their core tenets, their limits and their intersections, this paper offers the Five AIMS as cardinal concepts to help AI governance stakeholders, especially public and private decisionmakers, navigate the upcoming AI Action Summit and future governance conversation. Concluding on a set of ongoing research questions reflecting open policy challenges, it is a foundational step towards cementing the Five AIMS as a suitable framework for understanding the governance of AI.

A general definition of trust

Technical report

2012

Themes: Trust

Category: Open access, White paper/report

In this paper a definition and conceptual analysis of trust is given in terms of trustworthiness. Its focus will be as wide as possible, and will not be restricted to any particular type of trust. The aim is to show the key parameters that enable us to investigate and understand trust, thereby facilitating the development of systems, institutions and technologies to support, model or mimic trust. The paper will also show the strong connection between trust and trustworthiness, showing how the subjectivity of trust reveals itself in attitudes toward others’ trustworthiness; to trust someone/something is to believe that he/she/it is trustworthy. Both trust and trustworthiness are context-dependent, but the relevant contexts are different depending on whether one is trusting or trustworthy. Finally, the paper will discuss some of the complex issues connected with the alignment of trust with trustworthiness.

On blockchains and the General Data Protection Regulation

EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum

2018

Co-authors: Luis-Daniel Ibáñez, Elena Simperl

Themes: Blockchain/cryptocurrency, Data protection

Category: Open access, Peer reviewed, White paper/report

In this paper, we review the legal and technological state of play of the GDPR-Blockchain relationship. Next, we analyse three interaction scenarios between data subjects and blockchain systems, and propose possible ways of achieving GDPR compliance by using state of the art technologies. Finally we review current efforts in the use of blockchains to enforce GDPR principles, in particular ‘Data Protection by Design’.

Privacy, privacy enhancing technologies and the individual

Web Science Trust White Paper #1

2022

Themes: Privacy, Semantic Web/linked data

Category: White paper/report

Law has granted individuals some rights over the use of data about them, but data protection rights have not redressed the balance between the individual and the tech giants. A number of approaches aim to augment personal rights to allow individuals to police their own information space, facilitating informational self-determination. This reports reviews this approach to privacy protection, explaining how controls have generally been conceived either as the use of technology to aid individuals in this policing task, or the creation of further legal instruments to augment their powers. It focuses on two recent attempts to secure or support data protection rights, one using technology and the other the law. The former is called Solid, a decentralised platform for linked data, while the latter is a novel application of trust law to develop data trusts in which individuals’ data is managed by a trustee with the individuals as beneficiaries. The report argues that structural impediments make it hard for thriving, diverse ecosystems of Solid apps or data trusts to achieve critical mass – a problem that has traditionally haunted this empowering approach.

Data trusts: ethics, architecture and governance for trustworthy data stewardship

Web Science Institute White Paper #1, University of Southampton

2019

Themes: Data trusts, Trust

Category: White paper/report

In their report on the development of the UK AI industry, Wendy Hall and Jérôme Pesenti recommend the establishment of data trusts, “proven and trusted frameworks and agreements” that will “ensure exchanges [of data] are secure and mutually beneficial” by promoting trust in the use of data for AI. This paper defends the following thesis: A data trust works within the law to provide ethical, architectural and governance support for trustworthy data processing. Data trusts are therefore both constraining and liberating. They constrain: they respect current law, so they cannot render currently illegal actions legal. They are intended to increase trust, and so they will typically act as further constraints on data processors, adding the constraints of trustworthiness to those of law. Yet they also liberate: if data processors are perceived as trustworthy, they will get improved access to data. The paper addresses the areas of: trust and trustworthiness; ethics; architecture; legal status.

Four Internets: the geopolitics of digital governance

Centre for International Governance Innovation paper no.206

2018

Co-authors: Wendy Hall

Themes: Computing/The Internet

Category: White paper/report

The internet — a fragile construction of hardware, software, standards and databases — is run by an ever-expanding range of private and public actors constrained only by voluntary protocols and subject to political pressure. The authors describe four emerging views of how best to govern the internet, each playing a geopolitical role and championed at the national level.

The first, the Silicon Valley open internet, reflects the idealism of the internet’s creators, who engineered it to be open, with transparent standards and portable, extensible and interoperable data and software, and also to scale as it grew.

European nations, and the European Commission, champion a second model — a “bourgeois” internet, where trolling and bad behaviour are minimized and privacy protected, possibly at the cost of innovation.

China and many other nations see a third, authoritarian internet, where surveillance and identification technologies help ensure social cohesion and security.

The fourth and more commercial view, characteristic of the US Republicans in Washington, DC, understands online resources as private property, whose owners can monetize them and seek market rates for their use.

The competition to establish which, if any, of the four internets will prevail (however temporarily) is likely to be strong, and not always focused on win-wins. Further, the internet’s openness is a vulnerability that can be exploited for misinformation or hacking, an opportunity taken by Russia, Iran and North Korea, among others. The authors argue we need to be prepared for the internet that we know to evolve unpredictably, and work to ensure that it remains beneficial for humankind.