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By Audrey Hingle —

The Future of Interoperability is Private @ IGF 2025

This month, the Social Web Foundation is joining the UN’s 20th annual conference on the internet.

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Photo by Alistair MacRobert / Unsplash

This month, the Social Web Foundation is joining the UN’s 20th annual conference on the internet, the Internet Governance Forum. Held in Oslo, Norway, IGF 2025 brings together policymakers, technologists, activists, and academics to address the most pressing questions about digital governance. From AI regulation to connectivity in underserved regions, the agenda reflects how internet governance is now inseparable from broader social, economic, and political concerns.

Mallory Knodel, Executive Director of the Social Web Foundation and founder of this newsletter, will be moderating a workshop on “Privacy-Preserving Interoperability and the Fediverse”,  a session that speaks directly to the Social Web Foundation’s mission: growing, healthy, sustainable and multi-polar Fediverse.

The session will examine a practical tension: interoperability allows people to move fluidly across platforms—whether it’s Mastodon, PeerTube, or other services in the Fediverse. Yet this fluidity exposes new privacy risks. For example, a user’s profile photo or contact list might unintentionally follow them from one service to another without explicit consent. To ensure the social web continues to grow in a responsible way, we need thoughtful policy, smart technical design, and cross-sector collaboration.

To tackle this, Mallory will be posing three concrete questions to a diverse panel featuring voices from academia, civil society, and the private sector:

  1. User agency: How can we design cross-platform data flows so that individuals—not servers—decide what travels with them?
  2. Legal alignment: What does real compliance with the GDPR look like for a decentralised network, and how might the Digital Markets Act nudge the large incumbents toward meaningful interoperability?
  3. Technical safeguards: Which standards or privacy-enhancing tools could make federation safer by default?

By grounding the discussion in technical and legal constraints, this workshop aims to develop practical, actionable recommendations that platforms, developers, and policymakers can adopt. We’ll refine these into a summary document outlining key takeaways and next steps, which we’ll share in a future edition of this newsletter.

This conversation also comes at a critical time. The momentum behind decentralized platforms is growing, but regulatory clarity and technical safeguards lag behind. Without coordination, we risk repeating the mistakes of Web2: centralisation of power, opaque data practices, and exclusionary design.

Attending the IGF is free! Whether you’re joining us in Oslo or tuning in online, we encourage you to participate. Your questions, insights, and lived experiences help shape the conversation. We’ll be taking audience questions during the session, and they’ll feed directly into the discussion.

Internet Society Fellowship

I'm honored to share that I (your editor, Audrey Hingle) have been selected as a 2025 Internet Society Mid Career Fellow!

The Mid Career Fellowship is a seven-month program that offers 15 global Internet champions advanced training in leadership, key internet issues, design thinking and more through expert-led modules, practical case studies, and a final symposium.

As part of the fellowship, I'll be developing a case study that builds on the article Mallory Knodel and I wrote about robots.txt and its role in governing AI scraping which was featured both in a past edition of IX, and on techpolicy.press. I look forward to sharing it with you all here!

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From the Group Chat 👥 💬

This week in the group chat, we talked about Iran's internet outages. As Israel bombs Iranian targets and tensions between the countries escalate, the Iranian government has imposed sweeping internet restrictions, citing “special conditions” and cybersecurity concerns. Connectivity dropped by over 90% in some areas, effectively creating a near-total blackout.

Digital rights groups warn that these shutdowns endanger lives by cutting access to news, emergency information, and loved ones. Members of the group shared some tips members of our groups had for those in Iran who might want to try and connect.

Update: Most services in Iran are now blocked, so this advice may no longer be effective.

  • Email: Gmail and other major email providers work in Iran without a VPN. Email is a reliable way to stay in touch.
  • Video calls: Google Meet functions well without circumvention. To call directly via the app, users must add a phone number or email; otherwise, they can join meetings through shared links.
  • VPN access: VPNs are still commonly used for broader access. Ask trusted contacts for updated, working VPNs.
  • Starlink: Starlink is technically active in Iran, with an estimated 30,000–100,000 terminals in use, despite legal restrictions. Operating a dish does require a license.
  • Important context: Internet access remains politically sensitive. Any method used should weigh personal safety, legal risk, and local conditions.

Want to join our group chat? It's available to paid subscribers.

Open Social Web

Internet Governance

Technology for Society

Privacy and Security

Upcoming Events

  • Decrypting Diversity Summit. A summit with the goal of promoting diversity, inclusion, and gender equality within the cryptography community. 17-20 June, Montpellier, France. https://decryptingdiversity.com 
  • DPI in Conversation: A week-long event dedicated to understanding Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and the advancement of India’s digital governance agenda. July 7-11, 6-7pm IST. Online. https://form.sflc.in/dpi-in-conversation

Careers and Funding Opportunities

What did we miss? Please send us a reply or write to editor@exchangepoint.tech.

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