Session
Organizer 1: Annaliese Williams, 🔒.au Domain Administration
Organizer 2: PABLO HINOJOSA, 🔒APNIC
Speaker 1: Akinori MAEMURA, Technical Community, Asia-Pacific Group
Speaker 2: Renata Mielli, Government, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Speaker 3: PABLO HINOJOSA, Technical Community, Asia-Pacific Group
PABLO HINOJOSA, Technical Community, Asia-Pacific Group
Annaliese Williams, Technical Community, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Annaliese Williams, Technical Community, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Roundtable
Duration (minutes): 90
Format description: The roundtable format is best suited as we are seeking an exchange of views where participants will build on each other’s ideas, advance their thinking and develop shared suggestions. The time duration is required because we anticipate significant interest in this topic during this year’s IGF, and will need as much time as possible to allow participants’ ideas to be both shared and developed.
A. How should the IGF evolve to meet the challenges of the modern digital world? (E.g. What new working methods are required?) B. How can governments, the private sector, civil society, academia and the technical community better engage with each other within the IGF to address digital challenges? C. How and where can the NETmundial+10 guidelines and process steps be applied within the IGF framework and elsewhere?
What will participants gain from attending this session? Participants will explore ways to strengthen and improve stakeholder cooperation within the IGF framework that allow it to better deliver on the needs of diverse stakeholders. Participants will have an opportunity to provide views on possible policy outputs such as the development of shared norms, non-binding policy recommendations or other new working methods for the IGF. They will also have an opportunity to consider how the IGF can implement the NETmundial+10 guidelines and process for multistakeholder consensus-building and decision-making.
Description:
Global Internet governance requires effective models of multistakeholder cooperation, which requires continued efforts by all stakeholders to aggregate their interests into implementable policy solutions that can address complex digital challenges. The aim of this workshop is to identify ways to strengthen and support the open, transparent, inclusive and bottom-up governance process related to the use and evolution of the Internet. The workshop will consider the outcomes of multistakeholder and multilateral Internet governance and digital processes in 2024, such as NETmundial+10 and the Global Digital Compact, and how these may be applied to achieving the Internet we want.
The session will identify ways to strengthen cooperation among stakeholder groups and evolve the Internet governance and digital policy system, including evolving the IGF itself. The session will document any ideas for new IGF working methods that arise from this session. We envisage this session may generate proposals that could be followed up through National and Regional Initiatives and other IGF intersessional work for ongoing discussion at global IGFs in future years.
Hybrid Format: The onsite and online moderators will work together to ensure that both online and onsite participants have opportunity to contribute equally to the discussion and developing of any outcomes of the session. Onsite participants will be asked to log into the virtual meeting to better engage with online participants. The session will be designed to facilitate discussion and consideration of potential new working methods for the IGF. The online and onsite moderators will work together to ensure the participant experience is as similar as possible by asking onsite participants equal participant experience e.g all questions will be queued through the zoom room rather than selecting from those physically present. Participants may be invited to use Mentimeter or similar tool to engage with and measure responses to specific policy questions
Report
Speakers were invited to reflect on:
- how the IGF can evolve to meet the challenges of the digital world and whether any new working methods might be required
- how governments, the private sector, civil society, academia and the technical community better engage with each other within the IGF to address digital challenges
- where the Netmundial+10 Sao Paulo Guidelines and process steps might be applied in the IGF framework.
A summary of the discussion’s key themes is below.
A work in progress
Speakers agreed that the IGF remains a work in progress. The IGF has evolved since it was established and much of its value comes from its intersessional work: its best practice forums, policy networks and dynamic coalitions.
Ideas emerging as part of this intersessional work can percolate in the IGF and advance to high level discussions – an example given was the report of the Policy Network on Artificial Intelligence, which foreshadowed much of what was in the UN Secretary General’s AI panel’s report.
Speakers explored the need more effective coordination and integration into the global dialogue, noting there would be value in more effectively incorporating the NRI reports on national and regional IGFs into the global IGF program.
Moving beyond talk
Participants noted the need to consider the IGF in its context as part of the broader WSIS architecture.
There appears to be appetite for the IGF to link to decisional developments without having a decisional role itself. While governments are responsible for making national laws and policies as well as international treaties, there is a role for the multistakeholder community to provide input and influence decision-making – and to help deliver the WSIS vision.
The IGF could make use of the expertise of the technical community, private sector and civil society to develop best practice guidelines or recommendations that could feed into and influence multilateral and other decision-making processes.
Making recommendations is within the IGF’s existing mandate, and it was noted that some IGF policy networks and best practice forums are already doing this. However, it would require solid consensus mechanisms and the NetMundial+10 Sao Paulo Guidelines were suggested as a good starting point.
Areas for innovation
The session generated several proposals for further IGF innovation.
Discussion on improving the IGF program included:
- potential benefit of coordination among session organisers, to address significant overlap in topics and speakers and make the most of the ideas resulting from discussions.
- future programs could be designed to allow space for deeper consideration of issues with a view to finding solutions to problems, or at least genuine understanding where differences of opinion occur.
- consideration of each subtheme as a distinct part, with different modalities depending on the issue and community needs at the time (e.g. recommendations may be made on a subtheme, if required).
- creating a new session/workshop category for legislative and regulatory initiatives, where a government or a community put forward a specific proposal for discussion and input.
There was a proposal to make better use of the wealth of information that has been collected over the past two decades. Difficulty in navigating the IGF archives means that this rich source of information is not fully utilised. A catalogue of the archives would provide valuable insights into stakeholder views and could help to promote understanding of the IGF, and it was suggested that tools be used to extract data and produce summaries of key themes.
Suggestions for how the NetMundial Sao Paulo Guidelines can be incorporated included:
- the IGF could invite NRIs to consider where they may be applied or provide inspiration
- applying the Guidelines to how the IGF messages are produced and distributed.
There was also discussion on the limits of participation for speakers of languages other than English. The IGF requires a level of fluency in English that is restrictive for so many. It is well-recognised that the Internet needs to be multilingual, and yet IGF participation requires a level of fluency in English that is restrictive for so many. While no concrete proposals were put forward to address this, there was acknowledgement that there is more work to do to reduce language and other barriers.