New Initiative on Internet Governance

The World Economic Forum has announced the launch of the NETmundial Initiative on Internet governance cooperation.

Through close collaboration with key government, industry, academic and civil society partners, including the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the new initiative will provide a venue for leaders from many regions and sectors of society to discuss and collaboratively address a range of emerging policy challenges related to the Internet.

Specifically, the initiative seeks to provide an international, multistakeholder platform that brings together government, business and civil society leaders, along with the representatives of technical communities, to sustain and strengthen an effective and distributed approach to Internet governance.

The initiative will seek to make a contribution to the positive evolution of multistakeholder Internet governance in two concrete respects:

• First, taking advantage of the World Economic Forum’s uniquely interdisciplinary, leader-level multistakeholder communities, it aims to support a broader policy dialogue on issues that would benefit from the engagement of additional relevant ministries, industries and academic and civil society expertise beyond those specializing in the ICT sector and participating regularly in traditional Internet governance fora.
• Second, it will serve as a platform for galvanizing support for capacity building in two respects: to support developing countries that wish to enhance their access to the Internet and build their own multistakeholder governance frameworks; and to explore ways to strengthen the capacity of the decentralized Internet governance ecosystem to respond to specific issues or problems that arise, including those encountered by developing countries which may not be in a position to readily identify relevant expertise and resources.