Government representatives, UN systems experts and the leading private industry participants reframed neutrality in the digital age at the international forum “War, Peace and Neutrality,” at the United Nations in Geneva on October 10, organized by the Geneva Center for Neutrality, the Permanent Mission of Turkmenistan at the UN and the Greater Caspian Association. At the panel “Neutrality and AI: Security, innovation, governance” participants explored how neutrality in the 21st century should be understood - as infrastructure, as law, and as market design? From AI clusters and data standards to decentralized telecoms and post-quantum cryptography, speakers outlined what “digital neutrality” could look like in practice, and what might threaten it.

Tajikistan’s bet: neutral, green compute as statecraft

Sharaf Sheralizoda, Ambassador of Tajikistan to Switzerland, opened the session with a concrete proposal: a UN-backed Regional AI Center in Dushanbe. The center would coordinate AI education, startups, and research across Central Asia, and crucially, connect countries through a shared network of data centers.

The plan relies on Tajikistan’s energy sovereignty. “98% of our electricity generation is coming from hydropower,” - the Ambassador said, pointing to “about 500 TWh” of potential - enough to power massive AI compute “greenly”. Tajikistan’s national AI strategy runs to 2040, with a goal of 5% of GDP coming from AI-related sectors by then. Over 500 people have already trained at its AI Academy, and AI will become a separate school subject by 2028. “AI should remain development-oriented, trustworthy, and inclusive,” - Sheralizoda stressed.

UNECE: sovereign compute as the new non-alignment

“High-performance computing and digital assets consistently prove themselves tools to secure independent GDP,” - said Cristian Olarean of the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE). He argued that “digital neutrality” - backed by strong law, cross-border trust, and independence from global power blocs - has become a magnet for innovation in countries such as Switzerland. Olarean cited Kazakhstan’s 2024 launch an exaflop-scale supercomputer as a sovereignty move to keep capital and research onshore for large language models, weather prediction, and smart-city systems.

His checklist for digital neutrality: “backbone infrastructure, skills pipelines, neutral governance, renewable power for compute, smart digital-asset policy, and regional collaboration.”

Trade Corridors: neutral standards as common language

According to Mario Apostolov of UNECE, “Building a multimodal digital corridor is an elephant - you eat it bit by bit.” He described pilot projects digitizing rail consignment notes and port-to-port exchanges along the Trans-Caspian Corridor, all aligned with UN/CEFACT standards adopted by regional leaders in 2023.

Why the UN? Because, Apostolov explained, neutral standards provide a semantic ‘lingua franca’ competitors can accept without ceding commercial advantage to a private platform. In digital trade, he argued, “neutrality should be a technology-neutral standards, not a blockchain vs. database holy war.”

WISeKey: Political Neutrality ≠ Digital Neutrality

Carlos Moreira, WISeKey founder and former UN cybersecurity expert, warned that in technology “neutrality in the digital realm is transactional”. It is built not on declarations but on GPUs, data centers, semiconductors, and encryption stacks. Europe’s weakness, he argued, is scale and speed: “We don’t have a trillion-dollar digital company.” While U.S. firms trade at valuations 50–60 times revenue, European firms are often valued at just 1–2 times, starving them of growth capital.

His sharpest warning concerned post-quantum cryptography: “By 2027, U.S. agencies must be Q-ready; by 2030, legacy crypto should be retired.” Without action, he said, RSA-era encryption will collapse, threatening e-banking, cloud services, and even Bitcoin. “That is coming,” - Moreira cautioned, urging Europe to shift “from the What to the How.” He also called for stronger protections for users: “Web 2.0 stripped users of identity. The UN should make human-centric digital identity a real, rights-based deliverable.”

Neutrality by design, not by decree

Andrew El’Lithy, COO of Karrier One proposed decentralized telecoms as a complement to national carriers: replacing opaque routing with open protocols, verifiable ledgers, and on-chain governance. “This model doesn’t remove governance; it decentralizes it,” - El’Lithy explained, pointing to “programmable regulation” that gives regulators oversight without hidden backdoors.

Proton: Switzerland’s trust brand at risk?

Marc Loebekken, Head of Legal at ProtonMail, raised concerns over Swiss plans for blanket data retention. “It would force all providers to collect a large number of data about users,” he said and it is the opposite of digital trust. Born in Geneva after Snowden’s revelations, Proton was designed as an alternative to surveillance programs like PRISM. “I am not a strong believer in regulation,” - Loebekken added. What works, he argued, is space for privacy-first competitors and targeted antitrust action against gatekeepers such as app stores and mobile ecosystems. “We should develop targeted tools - not put everyone at risk,” - he said, citing the EU Digital Markets Act and U.S. antitrust cases as better approaches.

The big idea of the second panel was about neutrality, which is no longer just a foreign-policy stance. Online, it has become a service - one that can succeed or fail. When the service is trust, it creates space for dialogue, privacy by default, cross-border interoperability, and infrastructure no one actor can quietly control or switch off.

The forum “War, Peace, and Neutrality” ran throughout the day with three sessions: “Neutrality in the Modern World,” “Neutrality, Business, and Strategic Assets,” and “Neutrality and AI: Security, Innovation, Governance.” More than 300 diplomats, academics, policymakers, business leaders, and civil society representatives took part of it.