A plaything of powerful nations

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Netheads build, run and protect the Internet. They often profit from it too. More than 2,000 of them from more than 100 countries descended on Nairobi this week for the latest Internet Governance Forum (IGF), a conference organized under United Nations auspices.

The ponderous official theme was the Internet “as a catalyst for change”, with a lot of nodding to WikiLeaks and the Arab spring. The reality outside the conference hall, the UN headquarters in the Kenyan capital, was more striking. Kenyans nowadays often go online on their mobile phones. Surfing the web is getting faster and cheaper by the day. The Internet is no longer a geeks’ affair in the rich world, but woven into the fabric of business and life even in the poor one. The IGF is not a typical UN meeting with a carefully staged agenda and much diplomatic protocol. All participants had the same right to take the floor. Government suits had to listen patiently to the complaints of Internet activists. And the end of the shindig was not marked by a finely tuned communiqué, but by a workshop dedicated to what the organizers should do better. All this makes the IGF an unusual grouping. It is in effect a poster child for what insiders like to call the “multi-stakeholder” model.


A plaything of powerful nations