Oliver Cann, Director, Public Engagement, Tel.: +41 (0)22 869 1406, E-mail: oliver.cann@weforum.org
Geneva, Switzerland, 28 August 2014 – The World Economic Forum has today 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 through:
“The Internet is one of the key catalysts for global transformations,” said Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum. “This new initiative will provide a platform for dialogue among governmental, business and other leaders to safeguard the Internet, and preserve it as a shared global resource for human solidarity and economic progress.”
The initiative will seek to make a contribution to the positive evolution of multistakeholder Internet governance in two concrete respects:
“The historic NETmundial São Paulo meeting of April 2014 was fundamental in coalescing the global community around the need to cooperate and promote a multistakeholder model of Internet governance,” said Fadi Chehade, President and Chief Executive Officer of ICANN. “We are thrilled that the World Economic Forum will work with all of us in the Internet ecosystem to carry forward that spirit and turn all of those words into action.”
The initiative’s activities will begin with an initial series of dialogues in various regions in 2014, which will be followed by a global multistakeholder summit on Internet governance cooperation during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2015 in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland in January. These dialogues will inform and help shape the initiative’s activities and ultimate organizational structure. In the first phase, participants will determine issues and opportunities for discussion in such areas as:
Virgilio Almeida, Secretary for Information Technology Policy of the Ministry of Science of Brazil, who chaired the NETmundial meeting in April, said: “A multistakeholder decision process such as this must be inclusive, must be constructed in a bottom-up style and must leverage existing Internet processes, fora and initiatives that take into consideration the specificities of each stakeholder.”
The Internet is the operating system of global markets and all major international information and communication processes. Over the past 25 years the Internet has served as a key tool for development in political, economic and social spheres. The Internet will play an even more vital role in the future. By 2016, Internet-based economic activity in the G20 is expected to reach $4.2 trillion and, by 2020, more than half of the world’s population will be connected to the Internet, providing for opportunities of growth in many areas.
The Internet is a universal space that many expect to remain open, free, and borderless. Unlike many other human inventions, the Internet is both a technology and socioeconomic space created jointly by individuals, companies and sovereign nations. Internet governance is not a solution to its social, political and economic challenges, but can serve as a process to start building shared understanding and to develop the capacity to address these challenges as a global community. The result of these efforts should be an Internet that remains a resource of growth and opportunity for the whole of humanity, and the World Economic Forum is honoured to contribute to this goal.
Notes to Editors: