Our Urgent Need for Global Authorities

By Futurist Thomas Frey

In early 2025, the European Union fined Meta $1.3 billion for violating data privacy regulations while simultaneously allowing different content moderation standards across borders. The same week, TikTok faced bans in multiple countries over national security concerns, while X (formerly Twitter) battled governments over misinformation policies that varied wildly by jurisdiction. Meanwhile, deepfake videos of political leaders proliferated across platforms, with no coordinated response to determine authenticity or manage distribution.

The chaotic patchwork of regional regulations attempting to govern global platforms has reached a breaking point. What was manageable complexity in 2020 has become ungovernable chaos in 2025.

We urgently need global authorities for the digital age.

The AI Dilemma: Who Decides What’s Acceptable?

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and dozens of competing AI systems now generate text, images, and video that billions of people consume daily. These AI companies make thousands of content policy decisions: What questions will the AI refuse to answer? What images will it decline to generate? What political viewpoints will it present as balanced discourse versus dangerous misinformation?

Each company creates its own standards. OpenAI won’t help you write malware. Google’s AI won’t generate photorealistic images of identifiable people without consent. Anthropic emphasizes “constitutional AI” based on principles the company selected. But these are corporate decisions, not democratic ones.

Who elected these companies to determine acceptable speech for billions of users? By what authority do they decide which historical events can be questioned, which political positions deserve platform amplification, which scientific claims require content warnings?

The companies themselves don’t want this responsibility. Sam Altman has repeatedly called for government oversight of AI. Sundar Pichai has advocated for international AI regulation frameworks. They recognize that private corporations making unilateral decisions about acceptable discourse for global populations is untenable long-term.

Yet no global authority exists to create these standards. So companies improvise independently, creating inconsistent policies that satisfy no one while concentrating unprecedented power over human communication in corporate boardrooms.

The Deepfake Crisis

In the 2024 election cycle, deepfake videos of candidates saying things they never said circulated widely before platforms could identify and remove them. Some were obvious fakes. Others were sophisticated enough that expert analysis was required. Many were borderline—real footage edited in misleading ways that technically weren’t “deepfakes” but functionally spread misinformation just as effectively.

Each platform developed its own deepfake detection and labeling system. YouTube’s worked differently than Facebook’s, which worked differently than X’s. Some platforms labeled content as “AI-generated.” Others used “manipulated media” warnings. Still others relied on user reports and manual review.

The result? Chaos. Bad actors could post deepfakes on platforms with weaker detection while claiming “other platforms haven’t removed it, so it must be real.” Users couldn’t trust that consistent standards applied across their media diet. Political campaigns weaponized the inconsistency, claiming legitimate content was being suppressed while fake content circulated freely.

This isn’t hypothetical future risk—it’s current reality. And it’s getting worse exponentially as AI generation quality improves faster than detection capabilities. We need global standards for authenticating media, labeling synthetic content, and providing users with reliable information provenance. Without coordinated international response, this problem becomes unsolvable at the platform level.

Cryptocurrency and the Regulatory Void

Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX collapse in 2022 revealed the dangers of cryptocurrency operating in regulatory voids. Billions in customer funds vanished. Users in dozens of countries lost life savings. Jurisdiction shopping allowed companies to operate from locations with minimal oversight while serving global customer bases.

Three years later, the situation has barely improved. Cryptocurrency exchanges still register in crypto-friendly jurisdictions while marketing to users worldwide. When fraud occurs, victims face years of international legal battles to recover funds—if they can navigate the jurisdictional maze at all.

Binance paid $4.3 billion in fines to U.S. authorities in 2023, but continued operating globally with inconsistent compliance across regions. Tether, the stablecoin that underpins much crypto trading, faces persistent questions about reserves backing its tokens—questions that no global authority has power to definitively answer through mandatory audits.

We need a global cryptocurrency regulatory framework establishing:

Minimum reserve requirements for stablecoins
Mandatory auditing and transparency standards
Consumer protection requirements regardless of exchange location
Cross-border cooperation on fraud investigation and asset recovery
Clear jurisdiction for disputes involving international participants

Without this, cryptocurrency remains the financial wild west, where scams proliferate and legitimate innovation is hampered by uncertainty.

The Splinternet: Balkanization of the Global Network

China’s Great Firewall. Russia’s sovereign internet law. The EU’s GDPR creating Europe-specific compliance requirements. India’s data localization mandates. Each jurisdiction imposing separate, often conflicting requirements on global platforms.

The result is the “splinternet”—the fracturing of the global internet into regional networks with different content availability, different privacy standards, different user experiences. What you can access in Germany differs from what’s available in Singapore differs from what’s allowed in Brazil.

For users, this creates confusion and inequality. For businesses, it creates impossible compliance matrices. A social media company must simultaneously comply with EU data protection rules, Chinese content restrictions, Indian data localization requirements, and dozens of other jurisdictional mandates—many directly contradicting each other.

The technology that was supposed to unite the world is fragmenting along the same national boundaries it was meant to transcend. Without global coordination, this fragmentation accelerates until the “world wide web” becomes a nostalgic memory rather than lived reality.

Promoters of Chaos in the Age of AI

Since 2020, the sophistication of disinformation campaigns has increased exponentially. Large language models can generate convincing fake news articles at scale. Image generators create photorealistic “evidence” of events that never happened. Video synthesis tools produce fake footage of real people saying things they never said.

State actors—Russia, China, Iran, North Korea—deploy these tools to sow discord, undermine democratic institutions, and destabilize adversaries. But increasingly, non-state actors use the same technologies. Political extremists. Conspiracy theorists. Scammers. Anyone with internet access can now generate industrial-scale disinformation campaigns that would have required nation-state resources a decade ago.

Researchers tracking disinformation networks find them using AI to:

Generate thousands of fake social media accounts with AI-generated photos and biographies
Create mountains of synthetic “supporting evidence” for false claims
A/B test messaging to find the most emotionally manipulative framing
Automatically translate and culturally adapt campaigns across languages
Coordinate across platforms faster than human moderators can respond

Individual platforms can’t solve this. They’re playing whack-a-mole while attackers have exponentially scaling capabilities. We need international cooperation to:

Share threat intelligence about coordinated inauthentic behavior
Establish standards for authenticating human vs. synthetic content
Create rapid-response systems for emerging disinformation threats
Coordinate platform responses so bad actors can’t exploit inconsistencies

The chaos promoters are organized, well-funded, and increasingly sophisticated. The defensive response remains fragmented, underfunded, and reactive.

Global Authorities We Desperately Need

We currently have very few global authorities. The United Nations was created to resolve global conflicts. ICANN is the global authority for naming and numbering systems related to the Internet. The World Health Organization oversees health dangers around the world.

These existing institutions provide templates for what’s needed, but they’re insufficient for current challenges. We urgently need global authorities to regulate emerging areas that cross all borders:

Artificial Intelligence Governance – Standards for AI safety, bias testing, transparency requirements, appropriate use cases, and prohibited applications. As AI systems become more powerful, inconsistent national regulations create both gaps that enable abuse and overlaps that stifle innovation.

Digital Privacy Standards – Harmonized rules for data collection, storage, usage, and deletion that apply globally rather than forcing companies into impossible compliance matrices. GDPR was progress, but one region’s privacy law doesn’t create global standards—it creates compliance headaches.

Cryptocurrency and Digital Assets – International frameworks for registration, auditing, consumer protection, and fraud prevention. The borderless nature of cryptocurrency makes national regulation alone fundamentally inadequate.

Deepfake and Synthetic Media – Standards for authenticating content, labeling AI-generated material, and establishing content provenance. Individual platforms implementing separate standards creates exploitable inconsistencies.

Disinformation and Information Warfare – Coordinated response systems for identifying and countering state-sponsored and non-state disinformation campaigns that cross borders and platforms.

Content Moderation Frameworks – Not dictating what specific content is allowed, but establishing transparent processes for how platforms make content decisions, appeal mechanisms for users, and consistency standards across global operations.

Intellectual Property in the AI Age – As AI trains on existing content and generates derivative works, traditional IP frameworks break down. We need updated international agreements for the age of generative AI.

Human Trafficking and Online Exploitation – Coordinated international law enforcement with standardized reporting, cross-border investigation authority, and unified prosecution frameworks.

Global Digital Citizenship – Standards for digital identity, online rights, access to platforms, and protections against arbitrary deplatforming that apply regardless of physical location.

Cybersecurity Standards – Minimum security requirements for critical infrastructure, coordinated response to major cyber incidents, and international norms against targeting civilian infrastructure.

Every new form of technology adds an extra layer of complexity, and the types of dangers become exponentially more difficult to understand. AI doesn’t just incrementally increase risk—it changes the fundamental nature of threats we face.

The Sovereignty Objection

The immediate objection to global authorities is national sovereignty. Countries want to preserve their right to set their own rules, protect their own cultures, enforce their own values.

This is legitimate. The benefits of separate countries include cultural preservation, policy experimentation, and productive competition between governance systems. That competition has pushed standards of living to increasingly higher levels.

But sovereignty arguments break down when challenges are genuinely global. Climate change doesn’t respect borders. Pandemics don’t respect borders. Cryptocurrency fraud doesn’t respect borders. AI-generated disinformation doesn’t respect borders. Cybersecurity threats don’t respect borders.

For genuinely global challenges, purely national responses create either:

Regulatory arbitrage where bad actors exploit the most permissive jurisdictions while affecting users everywhere, or
Extraterritorial overreach where the most restrictive jurisdictions effectively impose their rules globally by forcing companies to comply for access to their markets

Neither outcome respects sovereignty. Both create dysfunction. Global authorities with limited, clearly defined mandates could address specific transnational challenges while preserving national sovereignty for genuinely domestic issues.

What This Actually Looks Like

Global authorities don’t require world government. They require international agreements creating specialized agencies with narrow mandates. Think less “global government” and more “international postal union for the digital age.”

These authorities would:

Set minimum standards, not maximum restrictions (creating floors, not ceilings)
Allow regional variation within boundary conditions (EU can have stricter privacy rules than the global minimum)
Focus on coordination and interoperability rather than uniform mandates
Include democratic accountability mechanisms involving multiple stakeholders
Operate transparently with clear appeals processes

The model exists. ICANN manages domain name systems globally without becoming a world government. The International Telecommunication Union coordinates radio spectrum allocation globally. The World Trade Organization establishes international trade frameworks. These aren’t perfect institutions, but they demonstrate that limited global authorities can function effectively on specific challenges.

What’s needed is extending this model to digital-age challenges that existing 20th-century international institutions weren’t designed to handle.

The Cost of Inaction

Every month without global coordination:

AI capabilities advance faster than any regulatory framework
Cryptocurrency scams steal billions from victims with no recourse
Deepfake technology becomes more sophisticated and harder to detect
Disinformation campaigns grow more effective and destructive
Platform fragmentation increases, splintering the global internet
Bad actors exploit regulatory arbitrage to evade accountability

The chaos compounds. The problems become harder to solve. The window for establishing functional governance frameworks narrows.

We have a very symbiotic relationship with the online world. If human institutions can’t establish legitimate governance for digital spaces, those spaces will be governed by whoever has the most money, the most sophisticated technology, or the most willingness to exploit the governance vacuum.

That’s not a future any of us should want.

Final Thoughts

The internet was built on the assumption that information wants to be free and that decentralization would route around censorship. Those were reasonable assumptions in the 1990s when the greatest threats seemed to be authoritarian governments trying to control information flow.

But in 2025, the threats are different. AI-generated disinformation at scale. Cryptocurrency fraud operating across jurisdictions. Deepfakes undermining shared reality. Cyber warfare targeting civilian infrastructure. Privacy violations happening in microseconds across global networks.

These aren’t problems individual countries can solve. They’re not problems individual companies can solve. They require coordinated international response through legitimate global authorities with narrow mandates to address specific transnational challenges.

The companies building these technologies are asking for this governance. The users being harmed by the governance vacuum are demanding it. The only question is whether we’ll establish functional global authorities through deliberate democratic process, or whether we’ll continue stumbling through chaos until crisis forces hasty, poorly-designed responses.

The urgency has never been greater. The dysfunction has never been more obvious. And the window for establishing legitimate governance frameworks grows narrower every day.

We need global authorities for the digital age. Not someday. Now.

Cryptocurrency Regulation: The Need for Global Standards

Deepfakes and Democratic Institutions: An Urgent Threat