From 31 October to 2 November, I attended the inaugural United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Athens, Greece. The forum stems from the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), a global effort to address how information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be used for development.
Being a UN summit, its format was based on the creation of texts: the 2003 Geneva Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action and the 2005 Tunis Commitment and Agenda for the Information Society. But this Summit was also different: it took a multi-stakeholder approach, allowing business and non-governmental voices into the sessions where the texts were being thrashed out by governments, and it was held in two phases. Despite a two year period for activities between Geneva and Tunis, the summit still ended with many unresolved issues related to ICTs, including intellectual property rights, censorship, freedom of expression, human rights, funding obligations and the debate over control of the internet root servers and domain name system. More discussions were needed, and so was born the idea of an Internet Governance Forum. But was this to be just another UN talk shop for the dominant powers, the usual suspects increasingly entrenched in governing the internet?
The event at the beginning of this month suggested the answer to be 'No'. The approach and feeling was very different to WSIS. Here's why: WSIS was top-down, with decisions ultimately being made by governments, even within the multi-stakeholder sentiment. The IGF, where no binding decisions can be made, offered representatives from governments, civil society, business and academia the chance to discuss unresolved WSIS issues on an equal footing. According to Jeanette Hofmann, a researcher from the Social Science Research Center in Berlin and a member of the IGF Advisory Group, the fact that the forum has no mandate to make binding decisions is the 'very pre-condition for equity among all stakeholders who attend.'
Being predicated on discussion alone is significant. It facilitates the development of a common language for these diverse stakeholders, with different agendas and interests, to effectively communicate and continue the process towards a broader consensus. It reduces the usual power structures. Practically this meant no official seating order in the halls, no tables for delegations indicated with name plates. In the workshops, panels were made up of representatives from government, civil society, business and academia, to discuss open-ended topics that didn't represent any particular point of view, e.g. content regulation and access to knowledge. The intention for the IGF format is that if, during the discussions, consensus builds between participants around an issue, these like-minded groups are able to form 'dynamic coalitions'. The coalitions will allow for the groups to formalize particular positions and agree to take collective action. In the event, there were voluntary proposals to form dynamic coalitions on internet governance, open standards and gender.
Of course, for any particular group wanting to make an impact, the workshops' relatively unsupervised, democratic and bottom-up discussion format presents a challenge, as discussed by Heather Ford in The Internet Governance Forum: A story in its beginning, middle or end? Heather offers some advice from the iCommons approach, because in its daily operations it is often the practical expression of the multi-stakeholder alliances the IGF wants to foster.
So, given the opportunity for talking openly and equally, what was up for discussion? The four main themes ' for which the main sessions have transcripts ' were Openness (freedom of expression, free flow of information, ideas and knowledge), Security, Diversity (promoting multilingualism and local content) and Access. Under these themes, 36 parallel workshops were held, with lively and fascinating debates. Brief reports are available for some of these workshops.
On the last day, the event's activities were summed up by a presentation titled Taking Stock: The Way Forward, and followed by an Emerging Issues from a Youth Perspective panel discussion. I was on the panel with representatives from Brazil, Canada, Greece, India, Nigeria, Mauritius and Turkey, whose collective experience is in a range of fields, such as sustainable development, media, ICT access, internet law, child safety and e-government. The panelists represented governments, civil society, business and academia. The key issues that emerged were related to safety for youth online, physical access to ICTs, access to access, in other words, the capacity and freedom to make use of physical access, online rights and responsibilities, capacity building and copyright. The last issue was explored throughout the forum, portrayed as the tension between protecting copyright and access to knowledge. Key messages that stood out were the call to make intellectual property rights more flexible to allow innovations to occur, to release scientific research under Creative Commons licences and to disinhibit the 'completely new type of free speech' facilitated by the internet. There's no doubt that the Creative Commons groundswell is gaining momentum and making waves at the highest international level.
In her speech in the closing ceremony, Hoffman said that the IGF 'offers the great opportunity to experiment with new formats of communication and consensus building across all sorts of geographical, cultural, sexual and political boundaries.' This open structure made for a unique and innovative event, which was 'a new vehicle for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue, bringing together these different parties that meet separately, but rarely together', according to Nitin Desai, the Special Advisor to the UN Secretary-General for Internet Governance. All of this may sound over-enthusiastic, but one must remember that the UN system moves slowly. For civil society and business to be given equal status to government is indeed a revolution in this system. According to Murali Shanmugavelan, an IGF panelist and head of the Information Society project at Panos London, 'It's conceivable that the UN may be forced to apply a similar approach to other global policy discussions.'
At the start of the IGF, Markus Kummer, the Executive Coordinator of the UN Secretariat on Internet Governance, was asked what he expected from the forum. He answered: 'The value of the meeting is the meeting itself. There will be no negotiated outcome. How will it go further? To be frank, we don't know yet.'
Given that the forum is not designed to take decisions but rather to identify issues that need to be tackled through formal intergovernmental channels, some people may be cynical about the efficacy of the effort. But the fundamental shift towards multi-stakeholderism cannot simply be dismissed by this cynicism. Launching into these uncharted waters is a step in the right direction and I look forward to seeing where this will leads at the annual IGF meetings that have been planned for Rio de Janeiro next November, and India and Egypt for the two years after that.
tags: greece policy-law igf internet-poilcy wsis un youth
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