Leaping to the Future: Human Rights, Economic Development, and Model Internet Laws in Latin America
A joint initiative of the Murrow Center and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, with the generous support of The Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands and other funders.
Our Purpose: This project aims to design and implement a positive agenda for digital laws in Latin America, grounded in a multi-stakeholder consensus to further both rights and economic development in the region.
Our Predicament: Governments throughout the region are struggling to design and adopt laws to address the rapidly evolving Internet landscape. Legislators and regulators cycle through their service too quickly to understand the full complexity of the issues at hand, while civil society actors have insufficient resources to maintain a sustained impact on the policy-making process.
Our Proposal: Drawing on a group of distinguished regional and international experts from research centers, government, civil society organizations, and industry, the Wilson Center and The Murrow Center will produce the “Bogotá Consensus” of defined principles for model laws which will address the following areas in Latin America:
- Internet access and connectivity
- Net neutrality (including zero rating)
- ISP liability and freedom of expression and press (including right to be forgotten)
- Data retention and privacy
Our Next Steps: A workshop addressing laws that balance privacy vs. free speech, as well as press freedom, is set to take place in Bogotá in February 2017, with funding from The Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands and Google, and in collaboration with the Wilson Center of Washington, DC. Attendees will seek to identify avenues to, and create, measurable impact on policy-making processes in the region.