Abstract
This chapter highlights the need for a new way to make law to govern internet interactions by incentivizing the world's peripheralized youth in becoming global citizens and forming online communities that can be trusted. The chapter also describes the emerging digital infrastructure of digital identity that can be used by youth in the new data economy to create access to opportunities unavailable to them in the physical world. With a new framework for developing appropriate policies for internet governance, including an acknowledgment that all citizens have a duty to participate in developing the norms of cyberspace, the authors present several opportunities for youth to participate in the global economy.
Top“Invisible” Youth: From Cyberattacks To The Rule Of Law
According to the U.N. World Youth Report (2020), every 1 in 5 youth are not in education, employment, or training (NEET), and to meet global youth needs, 600 million jobs would have to be created over the next 15 years. Young people not in education or employment are more likely to experience social and economic exclusion lasting generations. This particularly affects young women who are at least twice as likely to not be able to acquire livelihood skills through education or work (United Nations, 2020). Additionally, in studies conducted by Tykn (2021) and Pascual and Marchini (2018), respectively, there are roughly 237 million children without identifying information across the world and more than 1 million U.S. children who are victims of identity theft each year. These young people are the world’s invisibles, i.e., a disenfranchised youth at risk and vulnerable to further marginalization and lower quality of life. They are those for whom the world has given no identity and no dignity, many of whom are impoverished. The number of youths living in poverty, which is defined as living on less than USD $1.90 a day, are 140 million from ages 15-24 years old according to the International Labour Organization (2019).
Key Terms in this Chapter
First Principles: The fundamental concepts or assumptions on which a system is based; in this context it refers to how internet governance should be based.
Sustainable Development Goals: The framework developed by the United Nations for adoption in 2015 to achieve a better quality of life for people, flora, and fauna.
Peripheralized Youth: Young persons living in squalor conditions who are treated collectively as insignificant and without their own agencies as individuals.
Peacebuilders: Individuals who partake in activities that work to end conflict and injustice in nonviolent ways as well as change the systems that engender that conflict.
Rule of Law: Specified and established laws that are adopted by governing bodies to limit the practice of arbitrary force.
Information and Communications Technology: Otherwise known as ICT, is any channel that can allow for the creation, manipulation, storage, and transmission of communication; in this context refers to the channel using the latest technology.
Trusted Online Communities: An intentional online community rooted in the trust in other members that comes from secure digital identities.
Digital Identity: Required data about an individual stored in computer systems, or nowadays stored on the blockchain, that can be linked to their self-sovereign, civil, or national, identities.
Internet governance: Refers to the rules, policies, customs, and norms that shape how an individual acts on cyberspace applied by Governments, the private sector, and civil society.