Tuesday, June 10, 2025
Good morning Chair, co-facilitators, all,
I am speaking on behalf of a Technical Community Coalition for Multistakeholderism – a group of aligned members of the Internet technical community with a long history of involvement in multistakeholder Internet governance.
We appreciate the opportunity to participate in this stakeholder consultation and reiterate our thanks to the President of the General Assembly, to the co-facilitators and to the Secretariat for the preparations thus far in the Review process.
My comments focus on the third of the guiding questions for today’s interventions.
Before I move to that, I want to briefly acknowledge four things:
- Many more people around the world are participating in the Information Society than were doing so twenty years ago, and that is a success.
- Despite this, much remains to be done to bridge complex and diverse digital divides, so that all can participate.
- Since the original WSIS Summit, the Internet has been a key infrastructure for enabling the Information Society, and is crucial to the development of societies, economies, communities and cultures all around the world.
- The multi-stakeholder model has been – and remains – integral to the Internet’s continued development and success.
Our role as members of the Internet’s technical community is to operate the infrastructure that supports the Internet’s availability. We see an open, free, global, secure, resilient and interoperable Internet as a crucial foundation for human development, innovation and progress.
Ongoing engagement by all constituents of the multistakeholder model – governments, the private sector, academia, civil society and the technical community – help us find common ground and move forward as we navigate new technologies and governance challenges.
As such, through this Review, we urge member states to:
- Ensure the Review itself remains genuinely open to and inclusive of stakeholders’ input. The São Paulo Multistakeholder Guidelines offer a proposed approach to digital governance and deliberative dialogue which we strongly support.
- Ensure that the role of the Internet Governance Forum is maintained, and ideally that it become a permanent feature of the UN system, with better resources to allow it to function more effectively and inclusively. A critical component that is missing in the wider digital governance landscape is a multistakeholder agenda-setting function – and we believe the IGF could fulfil this – in turn aiding the development of a governance agenda for the global internet governance and digital policy landscape.
- Acknowledge that there is a level of complementarity between the GDC and WSIS, but also a level of overlapping coverage. We would advise against duplicating or proliferating governance forums, because proliferation disadvantages all stakeholders except the best resourced.
- Focus any additional resources on supporting broader and more diverse participation in existing institutions and processes. The ecosystem of intersessional work, for example through the National and Regional Initiatives, Policy Networks, Best Practices Fora, and Dynamic Coalitions, could be better utilised to follow-up on implementation and generate outputs.
Thank you for your attention.
List of organisations signing on:
.au Domain Administration Ltd (auDA)
Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC)
Asociación SVNet (.SV ccTLD)
Associação DNS.PT
Blacknight Internet Solutions Ltd (Blacknight)
Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA)
DENIC eG
DNS Africa Ltd
DotAsia Organisation
GoDaddy
Identity Digital Inc
IE Domain Registry CLG (.ie)
Internet New Zealand Inc. (InternetNZ)
Internetstiftelsen / the Swedish Internet Foundation
Japan Network Information Center (JPNIC)
Japan Registry Services Co., Ltd. (JPRS)
Kenya Network Information Centre – KeNIC
Network Information Center Costa Rica (NIC Costa Rica)
Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NiRA)
Nominet UK
Norid AS
Public Interest Registry
Punktum dk A/S
Taiwan Network Information Center (TWNIC)
Tucows Domains
ZA Registry Consortium (ZARC)