In recent years, digital policy has become a prominent topic in global policy debates, as evidenced by the ongoing discussions surrounding governmental/commercial surveillance and the building of 5G networks. This is due to the internet's global nature and the commercial opportunities it presents, leading to the rise of multistakeholder internet governance as an increasingly important policy field. A UN report titled The Age of Digital Interdependence (2019) emphasizes the need for cooperation among governments, the private sector, and civil society in global internet/digital policymaking. Our analysis focuses on discourses found in US, EU, and ASEAN digital strategies, hypothesizing that economic agents’ needs are given primacy over the needs of humans, leading to a discourse focusing on competition rather than cooperation, grounded in vertical power relations. Furthermore, see the prioritization of a striving for independence rather than the acknowledgment of actors’ mutual interdependence in global digital governance. This paper aims to trace the evolution of these regional strategies, and show how they have evolved over time.
