Rules-Based Order
The treaty infrastructure, multilateral institutions, and shared norms that make state commitments credible — not what states are permitted to do, but the conditions under which their commitments mean anything.
Treaty ratification counts, WTO dispute settlement outcomes, UN Security Council resolution votes, sanctions compliance rates, and bilateral trade agreement text — all of which measure what states are permitted to do, not whether the conditions for credible state commitment in digital domains exist.
The degree to which the substrate conditions for trustworthy cross-border digital commitments are in place: mutual recognition frameworks for digital identity, interoperable provenance standards for AI-generated content, binding transparency obligations on state-sponsored algorithmic influence operations, and enforcement mechanisms with sufficient teeth to make defection more costly than compliance.
Establish a standing multilateral technical body with binding arbitration power to audit and certify national AI governance frameworks against a published substrate standard, conditioning market access and data-transfer agreements on certification status.
Democracies with robust domestic AI governance frameworks seeking enforceable reciprocity; smaller states currently unable to negotiate bilateral data agreements on equal terms; multinational enterprises requiring legal certainty across jurisdictions; and civil society coalitions pushing for global baseline protections.
States that exploit the absence of binding digital norms — including those using algorithmic influence operations as instruments of foreign policy; platform companies that benefit from regulatory arbitrage; and domestic industries in strong-governance countries facing unlevel competition from imports produced under no-substrate conditions.
Condition bilateral data transfer agreements and AI market access on demonstrated substrate equivalency — verified by an independent multilateral technical body — establishing a trust-tier architecture for international digital commitments analogous to mutual recognition agreements in financial regulation.
The OECD AI Policy Observatory runs recurring public consultations on AI governance frameworks that directly inform G20 and G7 commitments. Submissions from civil society and technical experts are publicly indexed at oecd.ai/en/consultations.
The IGF's Dynamic Coalition on AI Governance (DC-AI) accepts open participation and produces policy recommendations that feed into General Assembly resolutions. Contact your national IGF coordinator to join at intgovforum.org.
The European AI Office is developing adequacy frameworks for third-country AI governance systems. Non-EU civil society organizations may submit comments through the EU's Have Your Say portal during consultations on implementing acts.
The Bureau manages U.S. positions in bilateral and multilateral digital governance negotiations. Public stakeholder meetings are announced at state.gov under the Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy.