Internet Governance: Our Region Makes its Voice Heard This Month

30/08/2012

Internet Governance: Our Region Makes its Voice Heard This Month


The 2003 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) organized in Geneva by the United Nations was intended to be a space for international negotiations on the challenges of new technologies and one of the first to give a prominent space to the issue of Internet governance. Later, the 2005 WSIS (Tunisia) agreed an agenda that included the launching of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to create a space for multistakeholder dialogue.

Since 2008, several major players of our region have worked jointly to organize preparatory meetings for the Internet Governance Forum with the aim of taking the point of view of the Latin American and Caribbean community’s to the global Forum.

This year’s preparatory meeting will be held in Bogota, Colombia, on 24-26 September.  The meeting will discuss is the voice of Latin America and the Caribbean that will be present at the global Internet Governance Forum which will meet in Baku, Azerbaijan in November.

Because of the relevance and importance of this event for our region, eight organizations will be joining forces in this effort: LACNIC, the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), the NUPEF Institute, the Peruvian National Office for E-Government and Information Technologies, the Colombian Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies, AHCIET, ECOMLAC, and the Internet Society (ISOC).

APC’s Valeria Betancourt highlighted the uniqueness of this meeting as compared to previous editions, and underlined the public consultation that will be launched to determine the topics to be treated: “Since 2011, the methodological approach for the meeting is substantially different from that of the first three editions. The exchange of ideas between the region’s various stakeholders has moved forward in recent years, and determining the Regional Internet Governance Forum’s agenda in a horizontal and collaborative manner seeks to add more dynamism and precision to the work carried out at the meeting. The current approach not only contributes to addressing Internet governance issues in the global arena but also attempts to advance in the construction of the region’s own agenda.”

Although the public consultation will be disseminated through various channels and will be available on laigf.org will this week, the topics that will be discussed are related to issues identified as central to the global agenda, preserving the nuances that are characteristic to our region.

The topics, which have already been present in previous editions of the Forum, revolve around Internet governance for development and human rights on the Internet, access and diversity, critical Internet resources management, security, openness and privacy. Two new topics have been identified because of their current relevance and importance: freedom of expression on the Internet as a cross-cutting topic for the entire forum and “emerging issues” related to mobile Internet.

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