Natalie Green

IGF-USA is one of the many regional chapters of the global Internet Governance Forum (IGF), which is the annual international multistakeholder forum on public policy issues related to the Internet and Internet governance.

One of the goals of the 2014 IGF-USA (other than providing an all day dialogue between sectors that rarely meet) was to help clarify the ideas and values of US stakeholders going in to the next IGF to be held in early September 2014 in Istanbul.

The United Nations’ Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will hold its final session to draft the new international development goals for the next fifteen years, and in a discouraging turn, access to information might be excluded. Access to information is a core element for improvements in various types of development.

Access to information, especially online, can facilitate improvement in an economy’s knowledge base, as well as more transparent and accountable governance. In a globalized and competitive world economy, growth is dependent upon the continuing free flow of transparent, inexpensive, and trustworthy information. Further, access to information is a basic right that enables the expression of other important human rights. Thus, a move to shy away from access to information as a development goal by a UN based working group is disappointing, to say the least.

Public Knowledge strongly advocates for the explicit inclusion of access to information and freedom of expression in the new UN Sustainable Development Goals, in order to make digital rights and access to information online an international priority.