There was one unpleasant message from the 2025 Munich Security Conference (MSC), which will have probably far reaching consequences for the governance of the digital space: Cyberspace will be governed by the rules of geo-political conflicts. And it is a battlefield in the 21st century wars.

Both in the “Bayerischer Hof” and in the “IHK Munich”, where the 11th edition of the Munich Cybersecurity Conference (MCSC) took place, controversial debates circled around the question of how civilian and military use of digital services will interplay in the years to come. The reality is that the digital revolution has not only revolutionized the way we communicate, do business and entertain ourselves, but also how states are resolving conflicts. And if the world is moving away from cooperation towards confrontation, this will have consequences how “to build a people-centered, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society, where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge” as 193 governments promised to the world more than 20 years ago, when they signed the WSIS Declaration of Principles in Geneva in December 2003.

In 2025, when we are moving towards the WSIS review conference (WSIS+20), the question is how far we can go in enhancing peaceful digital cooperation on a global level in weaponized cyberspace.

A War is a War is a War

Times have change since 2003. Bad guys are doing bad things in the digital world, argued one speaker in Munich. The good guys have to do something against them. But what is the right strategy to make the good guys stronger? Which tools are useful to beat the bad guys? And, a very complex question, who is a bad and who is a good guy?

Traditional categories no longer fit to bring a simple order into a multilayer, multiplayer digital ecosystem. The decentralized multistakeholder governance mechanism has shifted responsibilities. It needs a grand collaboration beyond established frontiers, based on mutual trust. But when trust is disappearing, re-centralization and new top down approaches for policy development and decision making are difficult to implement.

We see the blurring of lines between digital military and digital civilian operations. It gets more and more complicated to distinguish between criminal cyber activities from individuals or mafia-like organized criminal gangs and irresponsible behavior of states. Cyberdefence and cyber offence are “new services,” which are, on the one hand, based on the existing Internet infrastructure but have also been developed into a world of their own. Ninety percent of the infrastructure and the equipment needed for military reconnaissance and military surveillance on a global scale are in the hands of private corporations with their LEO satellites, land and undersea cables, and Internet Exchange Points. Any military operation today needs a new level of close collaboration between governments, the private sector and technical experts. And the interesting question is, who makes the final decision? The five-star general or the CEO of a satellite system?

At the beginning of the new millennium, there was an expectation that traditional wars with death and destruction would be an issue of the past, at least in the Global North. The general consensus was that in the digital age, conflicts between states will not disappear, but they will move into virtual spaces where adversaries will use cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns to undermine the stability of their enemies by creating chaos and confusion outside their own borders.

What we see now is that there is no difference between traditional wars and cyber wars: A war is a war, and a war is a war. It is a war in all spheres and dimensions: land, air, sea, cyberspace and soon outer space. It is both death and destruction as well as chaos and confusion. The digital revolution has enhanced the efficiency of traditional military equipment such as artillery and tanks, planes and ships. Artificial Intelligence has created new categories of weapons, from unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) via drones to lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS). And the AI arms race is in full swing. If you can destroy a tank, which costs around 5 Million Dollars, with a 500-dollar drone, then the economy of traditional warfare has lost all its balance.

How far this will go? Is there a way forward for the re-establishment of stability and the creation of a political balance of power in a multipolar world? The debate in Munich offered little hope that the ongoing militarization of cyberspace would be stopped soon. Progress made in international negotiations in the UN system as confidence-building measures in cyberspace by the launch of a “Point of Contact” mechanism, something like a “red telephone” for cyberattacks, or the adoption of a UN Cybercrime Convention did not play a big role in the various Munich workshops. Asked whether the new US administration will sign the new UN Convention against Cybercrime, Dmitri Alperovitch from the Washington-based Think Tank “Silverado Policy Accelerator” replied that he expects the new administration will probably prefer to settle digital problems in bilateral negotiations.

The bilateral phone call between Trump and Putin on the eve of the MSC also created many discussion waves in the halls of the “Bayrischer Hof.” Ukrainian representatives feared a Munich 2.0, referring to the Munich Agreement from 1938, where the British Primeminister Neville Chamberlain made concessions to the German Chancellor Adolf Hitler. However, there was also a discussion about Yalta 2.0 as a better historical reference. In Yalta in February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin re-organized the world in zones of influence and agreed on the veto rights for big powers in the UN Security Council.

Even the 1815 Vienna Congress was referenced as a historical model for managing the future. The trick in 1815 was, as Henry Kissinger has analyzed in his dissertation at Harvard University in 1954 (A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812—1822), that the winners of the Napoleon wars (Habsburg, England, Prussia and Russia) invited the looser, France, to become part of the solution for a restoration of traditional aristocratic powers in Europe. Do we move towards a “Metternich-Tallyerand” moment, where the new “Club of the Six Autocrats” (Trump, Modi, Xi, Putin, Erdogan and Mohamed Bin Salman) will define the rules of the road for the next quarter of our century?

The Role of the Global South

Historical references are on thing. Realities are another one. Today, a lot will depend from the Global South. Since a couple of years, the outgoing MSC Chairman Christoph Heusgen has invited more and more leaders from the developing world. And those leaders very often have a different agenda than the representatives of the “three digital empires”, as Anu Bradford has described USA, EU and China in her 2023 book.

The Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar was very clear when he argued that it is not in India’s interest to get pulled into conflicts between digital superpowers. But this would not mean that India returns to the concept of “Non-Alignment,” as India did under Primeminister Nehru in the 1950s when NATO and the Warsaw Pact started a nuclear arms race. India’s concept in 2025 is “multi-alignment,” based on an “India First Approach.” To have options is good, Jaishankar argued. “Why should it be a problem If I am smart enough to have multiple options? You should be admiring me; you shouldn’t be criticizing me”. And India, with its 1.4 billion people, its AI strategy and the software powerhouse of Bangalore, is on the rise to become the next digital superpower. It will define its own priorities, and it will raise its voice if new global rules are drafted. But also Saudi Arabia, which recently hosted the IGF, Brazil, which chairs the BRICS in 2025 and the African Union, where South Africa chairs the G20 this year, belong to the club of rising digital empires.

In his Munich speech, US Vice President J.D. Vance attacked the digital rules that the EU has adopted in the last five years as the Digital Market Act (DMA), the Digital Service Act (DAS) and the EU AI Act. The European participants were outraged to get instructions from the US Vice President on how to organize their internal digital market. But Samir Saran, president of India’s ORF Think Tank, was amused about the European protests. What Vance did, he said, is done by the Europeans if they travel to the Global South. They lecture us on how to organize our internal digital world. There is a lot of hypocrisy.

Certainly, lecturing each other is not the answer to the challenges of the digital age. There is a need to recognize that in the digital world, different countries have different priorities and that in a borderless cyberspace, a new level of multifaceted cooperation around issues of common interest has to be achieved. This can be done only if all stakeholders from government, business, civil society, as well as the technical-academic community, both from the Global North and Global South - the digital empires from yesterday and digital empires from tomorrow - are involved in their respective roles and try to find fair arrangements. The forthcoming WSIS+20 meeting could become a litmus test.

In another workshop, Finland’s president Alexander Stubb argued that Europeans did too long believe in Fukuyamas “End of History” and expected that every country would follow the European path. “We did not realize that other countries will choose a different road, and we forgot to enhance the European democracy model.” Stubb did not mention the multistakeholder approach as an option for democracy enhancement by bringing all stakeholders into bottom-up policy development processes, as it has been practiced for two decades in the Internet Governance world. Confronted with instability in Europe and the rise of right-wing parties, which got big support from J.D. Vance in Munich, the Finnish president was perplexed. “Why not try it with a stable monarchy?” was the reaction from Lana Nusseibeh, Envoy of the Minister of Foreign Affairs from the United Arab Emirates.

In other words, The question of how to re-organize the multipolar world in the digital age is on the table. However, the answers on the highest level are still shallow and inadequate.

Simplification of Digital Regulation vs. Digital De-Regulation

A third issue was regulation. Three days bevor the MSC, J.D. Vance did address the Paris AI Summit, where he critisized the EU AI Act. In Munich Vance critisized European platform regulation. When Ursula von der Leyen became the president of the EU Commission in 2019, one of her favorite statements on digitalization was, that Europe must not become a “digital rule taker”, but rather a “digital rule maker”. Europe must write the “digital rulebook” of the 21st century, she said.

Five years later, this has been achieved. Since 2020, more than a dozen laws have been passed by the EU to regulate the digital space with more than 1,500 pages of legal text: Digital Service Act (DSA), Digital Market Act (DMA), Digital Resilience Act (DRA), NIS2 for cybersecurity, the Media Freedom Act (MFA), Data Governance Act (DGA) and much more. In 2024, the EU AI Act, the world’s most comprehensive regulation on artificial intelligence, was added.

But the EU’s problem is that although Europe now has a highly developed legal system, the Chinese and Americans are ahead of the rest of the world in the areas of search engines, social networks, online trade, digital platforms and artificial intelligence. They dominate the global markets.

While the Chinese have in recent years cherry-picked those points from European legislation that fit into their autocratic system, the Americans have increasingly taken a confrontational approach, especially after the very energetic former EU Commissioner Margarete Vestager imposed fines in the millions on US Internet companies for not complying with European regulations. The attempt to create a channel for conflict resolution by establishing an EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC) under the Biden administration ultimately came to nothing, despite goodwill on both sides of the Atlantic.

Europe’s dilemma is, that they have now a digital rulebook, but no European champions. To understand all the legal complexities, private companies have to hire law firms if they want to be in compliance with the EU legislation. This drives costs and reduces innovation. Even among European businesses the question is asked, how much is too much.

When the new EU Commissioner Henna Virkkunen testified in the European Parliament in October 2024, she announced, that there will be no more regulation and she will work towards a simplification of regulation. This was good news. But how to do it is another issue.

Getting out of this dilemma is not easy. At the Munich Security Conference, Virkkunen was a maneuver. When asked whether the “de-regulation” called for by J.D. Vance and her “simplification of regulation” could converge, she gave an evasive answer. The existing EU legislation is in the process of being cleared of duplications and contradictions, she said. However, de-regulation of the digital sphere is not an issue for the EU.

Clear language, on the other hand, comes from the White House. In a memorandum Trump signed on February 23, 2025, it was stated: “Regulations that dictate how American companies interact with consumers in the European Union, such as the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, are being scrutinized by the government. Instead of setting their own businesses and workers up for success, foreign governments have been taxing the success of American businesses and workers. America’s economy will not be a source of revenue for countries that have failed to cultivate their own economic success.”

That sounds a little bit like blackmail. Will the right of the strongest Trump be the strength of the right? In the 19th century, the French philosopher Jean Baptiste Lacordaire formulated a principle that has actually lost little of its significance to this day. “Between the strong and the weak, between the rich and the poor, between the master and the slave,” Lacordaire argued, ‘it is the freedom that oppresses and law that liberates.’ The signals from Munich are that Europe’s digital future is facing turbulent times.