Last month saw the inaugural meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Athens, Greece. The IGF is an outcome of the 2005 World Summit on Information Society (WSIS), where United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan tasked Nitin Desai, Special Advisor for the WSIS, to convene a forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue. At the end of the WSIS summit, its chair, Yoshio Utsumi, was widely quoted saying that it "was not an end but a beginning". The same can now be said at the end of the first IGF.
Over 1,500 delegates flocked to Athens, the cradle of democracy, to discuss a common global vision of the development and growth of the internet. Government delegations were joined by academics, industry stakeholders, journalists and others to consider society's role in the internet, putting a large tick in the box for multi-stakeholder participation.
In his opening speech, Michalis Liapis, the Greek Minister for Transport, acknowledged that internet governance was about more than naming and address issues. Throughout the four-day conference, discussions were permeated by keywords that NMA readers will be familiar with: innovation, competition and investment.
A total of 36 workshops were held in parallel to the main sessions, where the key themes considered were openness, security, diversity and access. Much was made of the progress such sessions have made in bringing people together and in the vast attitude shift of the past four years. It remains to be seen, however, what conclusive action will follow. As one delegate from Australia noted, "Not much [was] said about how the IGF itself [could] move beyond discussion...and actually fulfill some of the other parts of its mandate...which required [delegates], among other things, to be able to make recommendations."
Karen Banks, networking and advocacy co-ordinator at the Association for Progressive Communications, in particular acknowledged the importance and indeed the necessity of discussion, but cautioned that in order for the IGF to deliver its desired positive outcomes, the discussion should be viewed as part of a wider process, with concrete actions being undertaken to move the discussions forward.
One 'process' of particular interest was civil liberties group IP Justice's proposal of a bill of rights for the internet age. Alongside the much-stated recognition that the internet is the backbone of the global information and knowledge society, the proposed bill would aim to enshrine the offline rights that have been in place for many centuries, providing a framework for respecting these rights online. This raised an interesting paradox. The internet has developed globally precisely because of the lack of government intervention. Yet because of the increasing spread of ICT and the information society globally, there are increasing calls for government and democratic institutions to become involved.
Paralleling calls for creative solutions to the problems being discussed to allow continued innovation, it was suggested that any such bill of rights should be created from the bottom up, by individual users, rather than top down from government. A noble sentiment, but as with so many discussion forums, after four days of dialogue, did the IGF merely signal the beginning of another round of discussions?
Now is the time for stakeholders to act on the discussions and to implement concrete actions to ensure that this was the beginning of what will turn into a successful process yielding real results, rather than another well-intentioned but doomed initiative.
Lucinda Fell is a senior account executive with Political Intelligence, the UK's leading new media public affairs consultancy; lucinda@ political-intelligence.com
Copyright: Centaur Communications Ltd. and licensors
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