IGF 2014

The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and Enhanced Cooperation has been introduced in the Tunis Agenda as two parallel tracks to address public policy issues related to Internet Governance (IG). While the IGF was set to be multilateral, multi-stakeholder, democratic, transparent and non-binding process; Enhanced Cooperation was focused on enabling governments to carry out their roles and responsibilities, in international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet but not in the day-to-day technical and operational matters.

While the IGF role is clearly defined in its mandate, there is no clear framework yet for Enhance Cooperation as a process. Both Processes address in their respective role (or mandate) IG Public Policies. One fact that we know by today is that successful IG Public Policies are the ones that are developed within a multistakeholder open balanced approach which became a trend on global, regional and national levels.

The workshop would address the following questions:

1. Can we view the IGF and Enhanced Cooperation as two linked processes since they both address IG public policies or they should remain and two independent tracks.

2. If the IGF is a non-binding and non-outcome policy dialogue platform, can Enhanced Cooperation serve as an outcome for this policy dialogue that can reflect multilateral, multi-stakeholder, democratic and transparent process.

3. In light of the two previous question, what should be a workable framework for enhanced cooperation that will enable governments to carry its role related to IG public policy.

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Workshop Agenda:

Mr. Qusai AlShatti - Background on Workshop Topic & Panelists Introduction - 5 min
Miss Désirée Miloshevic - Multistakeholder Engagement in Enhanced Cooperation process -5 min.
Mr. Ayman El-Sherbiny -The Role on Intergovernmental organizations in Enhanced Cooperation - 5 min.
Mr. Peter Major - Role and Ourcome of the Workgroup on Enhanced Cooperation (WGEC) - 5 min.
Mr. Mohammed AlQurashi - Enhanced Cooperation as a Process for Governments - 5 min.
Mr. Carlos A. Afonso - The View of Civil Society on the Enhanced Cooperation Process - 5 min.
Mr. Faycal Bayouli - Tunisia Experience in Enhanced Cooperation and the WGEC - 5 min.
Ms. Marilyn Cade - The View of The Private Sector on the Enhanced Cooperation Process - 5 min.
Workshop Participants, panelists and Remote Participants - Interactive Discussion - 40 min.
Workshop moderator and Panelists - Summary & Closing Remarks - 10 min.

The growing complexity and significance of Internet governance necessitates addressing the difficult issues that impact, or are impacted by the continued evolution of the global Internet. Capturing these issues requires that the roles played by intergovernmental, and governmental stakeholders in collaboration with Internet technical professionals, private sector businesses and other non-governmental stakeholders be better understood. Successfully dealing with these all-important Internet governance aspects requires connecting several, sometimes-disparate areas of technology, policy, development and civil society to work on solutions and act in concert to ensure collaborative stewardship of the Internet continues.

Program
Each panel member will provide an opening statement regarding the challenges and issues they see with the changing Internet Governance landscape as well as the roles that everyone, including governments, have in the multistakeholder process.

An open discussion will follow with the Moderator providing questions for the discussion.

Specifically, the panel will be asked to address the following questions during the open and interactive discussion:
• The Internet is expanding exponentially - Who is responsible for identifying the Internet governance knowledge gap among the different stakeholder groups?

• What can be done to bridge the Internet governance knowledge gap in terms of resourcing, scaling, and awareness building?


• How should these knowledge gap issues, and discussion be used to improve the global Internet openness and collaborative multistakeholder engagement?


• Where there are issues that may disrupt the roles of existing stakeholders, how should consensus on key principles or outcomes be reached for solutions that benefit the global Internet rather than special interests?


• How should market-specific challenges or issues that are particular to a local community be approached for the global Internet to continue its innovative contributions?

The successful evolution of the Internet has been depending on a flexible, decentralised, bottom-up and issue-driven set of interrelated governance processes open to participation by all stakeholders. During the past five years the dialogue on Internet governance has grown exponentially. As one of the Internet industry leader in their respective countries, most of the country code top-level domain operators have been proactively engaging in the Internet governance process. They have become one of the main avenues to reach out their local community on this matter.
The workshop aims to show best practice cases of ccTLDs that have facilitated the development of “IG-literacy” through initiatives that have contributed to feed the IG process with local input on the IG ecosystem and the need that it remains anchored to the principles of multi-stakeholderism, openness, transparency and accountability.
In the spirit and with the ultimate goal of assuring a constructive evolution of the current IG model, various ccTLDs have been playing key roles in the IG arena and helped enhancing the dialogue at multiple levels.
The workshop will be set in the form of a round table where panelists and attendees will be given ample room for discussion. Central in the discussion will be the identification of difficulties and opportunities to engage the local community in an Internet Governance debate.
A dedicated social media campaign will be enforced to ensure the broadest possible participation before, during and after the workshop.

The multi‐stakeholder model has been an important factor for the success of the Internet. However it is necessary to recognize that the Internet governance dynamics have changed. The new dynamics among stakeholders is associated with an overall increase of complexity and differentiation and suggests that it is increasingly difficult for one single governance regime to address the broad range of concerns associated with today’s Internet. What is needed is to allow for a better match between discrete governance issues and the suitable institutions available.
The panel addresses this situation by advancing an innovative model. It asks whether it is feasible to consider an evolution of the current system to allow for a better interplay among the different actors of the governance process towards a multi‐stakeholder model with variable geometry.

While all stakeholders need to participate in the multi-stakeholder model on equal footing when different governance issues and institutions are envisaged and discussed, then in the implementation of the governance process one stakeholder or a coalition of stakeholders (variable geometry) could take the lead according to the nature of the governance issue at stake: e.g. standards (the private sector), Internet issues relevant to particular communities (civil society), human rights (government).
The variable geometry approach has been discussed in the WTO negotiations to take into account differences among countries participating in the agreement (for instance developing countries) and to reduce the perennial tension between depth and width of the treaties.
The workshop will explore what can be learnt from these experiences for the Internet governance context.

ICANN is a multi-stakeholder organization that has a critical yet confined role as a steward of the Internet identifiers and protocol parameters. ICANN coordinates closely with other actors in the Internet ecosystem who play a key role in managing the technical resources of the Internet infrastructure. ICANN also has relationships with many different stakeholders who participate in various Internet governance processes at regional and international levels.
ICANN continuously seeks to improve its multi-stakeholder structures and policy development processes to be more effective, inclusive, and transparent. It does that through ongoing reviews undertaken by community members representing all stakeholder groups. The Affirmation of Commitments Reviews and the implementation of recommendations of the Accountability and Transparency Review Teams (ATRT1) and (ATRT2) are example of such community reviews.
ICANN also contributes to several initiatives and efforts aiming to evolve the global multi-stakeholder Internet governance cooperation, and to strengthen ICANN’s multi-stakeholder model. The ICANN Strategy Panels, the Montevideo Statement by leaders of Internet organizations, and the High-Level Panel on the Future of Global Internet Cooperation, are all efforts toward this objective.

This workshop is targeted toward those with an interest in the evolution of the Internet governance ecosystem, and will address a range of issues in this area including:
• ICANN accountability and transparency mechanisms;
• Globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, including the NTIA transition dialogue;
• Enhancing global multi-stakeholder Internet governance cooperation, including reflections on Netmundial;
• Roadmap toward collaborative and inclusive Internet Governance, including the output of the High-Level Panel.


Detailed Agenda:

Introduction by moderator (2 min);

Panelists to react to following questions (10 min per question):

(1)How do you see progress made with regard to the process towards completing the transition of NTIA’s stewardship of the IANA functions?

(2) How can ICANN’s accountability and transparency mechanisms continue to evolve to support globalization of the organization?

(3)What are the key outcomes of Netmundial, and how can the global Internet community benefit from its success?

(4)What are the key recommendations of the High-Level Panel’s report, and what are the next steps?

Discussion with floor (40 min)

Closing remarks by panelists (1 min each)

Ever since the WSIS and WGIG a decade ago, many have argued that there is an important gap in the distributed institutional architecture of global IG. We lack ways to perform holistic, ongoing monitoring and analysis of policy-related developments, and to aggregate and disseminate information needed to make fully informed decisions. This is especially the case with so-called “orphaned” and multidimensional issues that do not fit neatly within any single organization. Where then can governments and stakeholders turn for accessibly formulated and usable information on policy, best practices, and lessons learned, and to connect with sources of experience and expertise in order to construct governance networks that can help identify forward-looking solutions?

Recently, there has been a number of proposals about this informational function. They vary not only in their details but even in how they label what is proposed, e.g. a clearing house, knowledge bank, observatory, policy network facilitator, IGF+, etc. While none of the labels fully capture the ideas in play, there is growing interest in moving forward, as is evidenced by the dialogues and initiatives in the IGF, WGEC, NETmundial, the High Level Panel, EC, ISOC, civil society, academic organizations, etc. Accordingly, the NonCommercial Users Constituency of ICANN (includes 94 organizations and 252 individuals in 81 countries) proposes this workshop to help advance and give shape to the discussion. The panelists and audience would brainstorm on such questions as: What, substantively and operationally, would be entailed by the function? What would be needed to institutionalize and perform it effectively? Which organizations would be involved, with what kinds of interrelationships?

Critics of multistakeholder Internet governance have long focused on ICANN accountability and transparency. But issues of who is accountable to whom exist throughout the Internet governance ecosystem. Traditionally, Internet technical organizations have prided themselves on the way that people participated as individuals, rather than as representatives of organizations or businesses, when developing standards and policy. However, as the Internet has grown and become more integrated with all aspects of life, more stakeholders are wishing to participate. Resource limitations, however, mean individual voices are becoming less common and more organizations are beginning to represent, or claim to represent, their communities in wider Internet governance discussions. In addition, as more stakeholders enter Internet governance discussions, it becomes more difficult to assess via direct experience whether the individuals and those stating that they representing wider groups of stakeholders are acting as responsible stakeholders or have other reasons for engaging in processes.

This workshop will discuss accountability mechanisms and gaps in today’s hybrid multistakeholder Internet governance system where stakeholders participate as individuals, as representatives of organizations or groups of stakeholders, or as representatives of entire nation states. Using accountability literature available in (non-Internet) governance as a starting point, the workshop will examine ways to strengthen the accountability mechanisms available to:

• Stakeholders participating directly in multistakeholder Internet governance decision-making processes;
• Organizations representing the collective voice of their communities in high-level Internet governance discussions such as the UN and IGF; and
• Organizations tasked with implementing policies and decisions by their stakeholders.

The adoption of (Internet) standards and best practices is a topic of much interest in improving cyber security and deterring cyber crime. In order for either standards or best practices to be effective, they must both be developed and be adopted. Achieving wide-scale adoption can be slow, as it requires building awareness and gaining consensus on practices. One key issue is who bears the responsibility for the implementation of standards and best practices. Another issue is the effect of (non-) adoption on Internet security.

In The Netherlands, standards and best-practice implementation is part of the Dutch government's medium-term vision for telecommunication, media and Internet. This discussion process is supported by organisations like SIDN, NLnet Labs, RIPE NCC, SURFnet; key players with global impact.

Adoption of standards and best practices promoting cybersecurity is a multi national topic. NLIGF proposes to organise a paneldiscussion on this issue, addressing it from a global scope. Topics include the stakeholders and bodies that can or should develop standards and best practices, cooperation between these bodies and the process of deciding which issues to prioritize. The roles of consumers, industry, government in (non-)adoption is looked at, as well as the cost allocation of implementation. The panel will also consider how to ensure that developing nations can contribute to and take advantage of standards and best practices for cybersecurity and discuss new partnerships. Panellists range as wide as the topics are. The respective points of view of the panellists are part of this proposal.