Feminist Principles of the Internet

Feminist Principles of the Internet (FPI) is the collectively-authored foundational internet governance framework developed by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) through the Imagine a Feminist Internet process. First drafted in April 2014 and published as Version 2.0 in August 2016, the framework states seventeen principles across five thematic clusters — addressing digital access, movement building, internet governance participation, economic justice, feminist expression, and online safety including data, consent, and gender-based violence — organised around the working demand that a feminist internet "works towards empowering more women and queer persons – in all our diversities – to fully enjoy our rights, engage in pleasure and play, and dismantle patriarchy." The framework is broader than AI-specifically: it covers the full spectrum of feminist internet governance concerns, from affordable connectivity to online violence. Within this corpus it registers as a foundational cultural artifact of the feminist internet movement that the corpus's feminist AI governance organisations operate inside — several of the corpus's anchor feminist AI governance organisations work within the APC network that stewards the FPI — and because APC has explicitly extended the framework into AI governance through its ten feminist principles for the 2023 United Nations Global Digital Compact, which include a named demand for moratoriums on high-risk AI systems.

Origin

The framework's origin sits in the first global Imagine a Feminist Internet meeting, convened by APC in Port Dickson, Malaysia, April 13–17, 2014. Around 50 activists and advocates from across sexual rights, women's rights, violence-against-women, and internet rights fields gathered to articulate a feminist lens on internet rights, with APC Women's Rights Programme manager Jac sm Kee framing the purpose as "bridging the gap between feminist movements and internet rights movements to look at strategic opportunities to work together as allies and partners." The meeting brought together participants from across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe — including Chat Garcia Ramilo from the Philippines, Bishakha Datta from India, and Sheena Magenya from Kenya — and operated as an open-space process where topics were collectively identified, prioritised, and discussed before a volunteer group from the meeting drafted the first principles text. The cross-movement bridging intention was explicit: the feminist and women's rights movements had spent a decade building activist vocabulary on gender-based violence, reproductive rights, and bodily autonomy online, while the internet rights movement had built a parallel decade of vocabulary on surveillance, privacy, censorship, and access; the Imagine a Feminist Internet process was designed to produce a working framework that held both bodies of work together.

Version 1.0 launched publicly on 1 September 2014 at the Sexual Rights Pre-Event of the 2014 Internet Governance Forum in Istanbul — the IGF being the UN-convened annual global forum on internet governance policy, and the pre-event placing the FPI launch inside the working international internet governance register at the field's most significant annual meeting. The framework was carried through a second round of revision at a second Imagine a Feminist Internet meeting in July 2015, which brought 40 activists through a further round of elaboration; Version 2.0 was published in August 2016 and is maintained at feministinternet.org as a living text. By design the principles are explicitly evolutionary rather than fixed — successive Imagine a Feminist Internet gatherings amend the living text, and APC's Women's Rights Programme stewards the revision process.

The seventeen principles

Version 2.0 states seventeen principles across five clusters. The Access cluster (Principles 1–3: Access, Information, Usage) anchors on the demand that "a feminist internet starts with enabling more women and queer persons to enjoy universal, acceptable, affordable, unconditional, open, meaningful and equal access to the internet" — naming the digital gender gap as a structural starting point, opposing conditional access models such as Facebook's Free Basics, and demanding equitable participation across the full life of technology from design to governance. The Movements and Public Participation cluster (Principles 4–6: Resistance, Movement Building, Decision Making in Internet Governance) covers the collective infrastructure of feminist digital activism: the right to resist and organise using digital tools, the conditions for building movements across digital and physical space, and — in Principle 6 — the substantive demand for feminist participation in internet governance decision-making, "challenging the patriarchal spaces and processes that control internet governance" and putting more feminists and queers at the decision-making tables of global, regional, and national internet governance bodies. The Economy cluster (Principles 7–8: Alternative Economies, Free and Open Source) addresses the material conditions of feminist internet participation, including a demand for free and open source software and standards as feminist goods enabling access independent of corporate gatekeeping. The Expression cluster (Principles 9–11: Amplifying Feminist Discourse, Freedom of Expression, Pornography and "Harmful Content") covers the conditions of feminist speech online — amplifying marginalised voices, defending freedom of expression, and critically engaging with harmful-content regulation as a site where feminist and internet-freedom arguments have historically been in tension. The Agency cluster (Principles 12–17: Consent, Privacy and Data, Memory, Anonymity, Children and Youth, Online Violence) covers the conditions of feminist online safety and autonomy: informed digital consent, protection of personal data, the right to control one's digital memory, safe anonymous participation, child protection, and — in Principle 17 — a named feminist demand that technology-facilitated gender-based violence be treated as part of the continuum of real-world violence rather than a category distinct from physical harm.

Travel into AI governance

The FPI is an internet governance framework in the full breadth of that phrase — broader than AI-specifically, covering feminist concerns from affordable connectivity to online violence. Within this corpus it registers as a foundational cultural artifact because the feminist AI governance field that corpus organisations inhabit operates inside the APC feminist internet ecosystem that stewards the FPI, and because APC has explicitly extended the framework into AI governance through the 2023 Global Digital Compact feminist principles.

The GDC feminist principles are the clearest single artefact of the FPI's AI governance extension. Principle 5 maps the FPI's Privacy and Data and Consent principles directly onto AI governance architecture, demanding that states and multilateral bodies "expressly ban surveillance applications that cannot be operated in compliance with international human rights law and impose moratoriums on the sale and use of AI systems that carry a high risk for the enjoyment of human rights unless and until adequate safeguards to protect human rights are in place", with explicit requirements for transparency in AI datasets, their sources, and applied algorithms. The GDC framework also includes an Equality-by-Design principle demanding that AI development incorporate feminist perspectives at the design stage — an extension of the FPI's Access and Usage principles into the AI development pipeline. Corpus organisations including Pollicy, Derechos Digitales, and Digital Rights Foundation contributed alongside APC to the development of the GDC feminist principles, making the GDC framework a direct collaboration between the FPI's steward and the corpus's principal feminist AI governance organisations.

The FPI's structural role in the feminist AI governance field is foundational rather than cited. The corpus's anchor feminist AI governance organisations — Coding Rights, Derechos Digitales, Digital Rights Foundation, and Pollicy — are all APC network members or close APC partners, and their feminist AI governance frameworks (the Feminist AI umbrella, the Afro-feminist AI register, the Hamara Internet programme) were developed within the same feminist internet governance intellectual ecology the FPI anchors. The FPI functions less as a cited text in the feminist AI governance literature than as the prior movement vocabulary that the feminist AI governance field assumed and built upon — the underlying framework of feminist internet rights that made subsequent feminist AI governance articulations legible inside a pre-existing civil society field.

Why it has carried

Three features have made the framework durable across a decade and into the AI governance moment.

First, the framework holds the canonical cross-movement bridge position between feminist movements and internet rights movements, and that bridge position has held as internet governance has expanded to include AI governance. The 2014 intention to bridge these two civil society fields has become a structural position that makes the FPI a working reference point for feminist civil society entering AI governance debates: the framework gives a feminist movement arriving at the AI governance table a prior vocabulary and a working register of internet-governance norms that the AI governance field is itself built upon.

Second, the framework's evolving design has kept it current across technology transitions. Its 2023 extension into the Global Digital Compact feminist principles is the clearest evidence of the living-document design performing its function: rather than becoming a historical artifact, the FPI framework was extended by APC and feminist civil society partners into the multilateral AI governance register at the moment the multilateral register was being written.

Third, the governance principle (Principle 6 — Decision Making in Internet Governance) has given the framework a sustained institutional presence. The explicit demand for feminist participation in internet governance has carried through to CSW67 (APC and Women at the Table co-chaired the first technology-focused Commission on the Status of Women expert group in 2023), the Global Digital Compact (the September 2024 text included a named gender paragraph shaped by APC's and partners' feminist principles advocacy), and the feminist AI governance civil society field more broadly — each a working artefact of Principle 6's demand being realised in the specific multilateral governance registers the feminist internet movement has targeted since 2014.