Dame Wendy Hall is Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton and co-author of Four Internets: Data, Geopolitics, and the Governance of Cyberspace. In 2023, Dame Wendy was appointed to the UN’s high-level advisory body on artificial intelligence, which released its report, “Governing AI for Humanity,” in September 2024.

‘There is no doubt that the world is very dependent on the Internet these days. If it wasn’t obvious before, we certainly realised our dependency during the Covid-19 pandemic. Also, when the whole world piled onto the Internet in order to do anything during the lockdowns, it stayed up and running which is a huge testament to the foresight of the Internet pioneers in terms of its design and in built resilience and scalability.

‘But the Internet has never been under such threat and its whole future as a globally interconnected system is in much doubt for many different reasons. In this talk we will explore the future of the Internet through the perspective of geopolitics and data governance. We will argue that through this lens we see at least four internets, maybe more, rather than just one interconnected ecosystem. We will explore what aspects of the governance of cyberspace we must protect the most in order for us to continue to use the technical infrastructure of the Internet that we all rely on to support cloud and data services, and how this is all playing out in the age of AI.’