The Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG), set up by the United Nations to review and recommend appropriate proposals on the governance of Internet by 2005, has been unable to reach to a decisive conclusion on how the Internet should be governed.
WGIG’s Final Report, released on 14 July 2005, has finally laid down four rival models of Internet governing before the governments and other stakeholders of the World Summit on the Information Society.
Since September 2004, with a consultation on the setting up of WGIG in Geneva, the independent working group met four times between November 2004 and June 2005, while consulting with various stakeholders. Under the chairmanship of Nitin Desai, Special Advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General for WSIS, WGIG produced reports on a wide range of Internet governance issues, undertaken consultations with the governments, private sector and civil society organizations to produce its final recommendations to the WSIS Secretariat.
In a press release, WGIG has commented, “the Report identifies a vacuum within the context of existing structures and notes that there is no global multi-stakeholder forum to address Internet related public policy issues. It therefore proposes the creation of a global forum for dialogue among all stakeholders such as governments, the private sector and civil society, to address problems linked to Internet governance, including spam and cyber crime. Since it was unable to agree on a single model, the Working Group in addition sets out four possible models for the conduct of global public policy and oversight of the Internet.”
Commending the work of WGIG, Markus Kummer, the executive coordinator of WGIG, categorically underlined the success of the Group as it had succeeded in creating an aura of trust among the stakeholders. \"Internet governance is not just names and addresses,\" Kummar said, possibly to offset the unease after failing to recommend the next course of action for the global community. Kummar mentioned of other issues - multi-lingualism, data protection and interconnection costs – that are being dealt within the ambit of Internet governance.
The release of WGIG has attracted mixed political and technical responses from various governments, private sector, academia and civil society. In its response to WGIG, the Internet Governance Project, a consortium of academic experts on international Internet regulation and policy, said that, WGIG has been successful in making a call for moving beyond unilateral U.S. control of the domain name system, and recognizing that existing Internet-related treaties around intellectual property protection are controversial, and may need to be reviewed to be better balanced with values such as fair use, free expression, privacy, technical innovation and economic development.
Creation of a permanent forum to steer the process of Internet governance debate forward has been proposed. The new, open global Internet policy forum will be mandated to give equal status to citizens and governments. Supporting the forum’s ideals, IGP comments “Such a forum will not succeed unless its efforts are focused on a particular objective…the new forum focus on preparing the world\'s governments to achieve binding agreements on the basic principles and norms to guide Internet governance.”
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