IGP attended the UN General Assembly meeting in New York December 15 – 17, where a much anticipated “overall review of the implementation of the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society” took place. The “high-level meeting” produced an outcome document that updates the WSIS consensus in the light of the growing centrality of digital technology in social and economic affairs.
WSIS will continue for another 10 years at least. Yawn. The only notable thing about the WSIS+20 outcome is its transformation of the Internet Governance Forum. The UN decided to make the IGF “a permanent forum of the United Nations.” To understand what that means, we need to retrace the evolving relationship between state actors and non-state actors in Internet governance – a tense dynamic that has defined the WSIS process from the beginning.
Should we have ended WSIS?
IGP advocated ending WSIS in a paper circulated at the Norway Internet Governance Forum in June 2025. This was controversial, because many people confused our call to end WSIS with opposition to multistakeholder Internet governance. This misperception was based on the mistaken belief that the WSIS Tunis Agenda was responsible for legitimizing multistakeholder Internet governance. In fact, self-governance by the Internet community emerged well before WSIS, from 1996 to 2000. WSIS was initially a hostile reaction by governments and multilateral institutions to the threat that the Internet and its governance by non-state actors posed to states’ power over communications. The UN-based attempt to re-assert sovereign control of information and communications was countered by civil society actors, the private sector, the U.S., Europe, and other liberal democracies that saw the emerging governance arrangements in a more positive light. WSIS thus became the forum through which governments, business and civil society came together to discuss and negotiate new models of governance for the Internet, including ICANN.
Obviously, ICANN and the other native Internet governance institutions survived WSIS. Our advocacy of an end to WSIS after 20 years of repetitive meetings and outcome documents was intended to be a wake up call. It would force the people involved to think more seriously about what value the process adds. It was also meant to shatter collective delusions about the importance of multilateral institutions in the development and governance of rapidly transforming ICTs. The massive growth in ICT penetration and use since 2005, and its evolution of powerful new capabilities, has been driven primarily by private investment and the expansion of commercial markets. The “Digital Solidarity Fund” produced by the 2005 WSIS agreement, for example, was an abject failure at expanding connectivity in Africa. Ameliorative efforts by national governments to “bridge the digital divide,” taking place under the WSIS umbrella, have had some good effects in some states, but ninety percent or more of the “ICT development” the WSIS process calls for has come from commercial, social and private development, not from governments or multilateral institutions.
Another reason we advocated ending WSIS was that we saw it as a way to make the IGF permanent and independent. The idea was to detach IGF from the multilateral system, and let it take its place alongside ICANN, the RIRs, the CA/Browser Forum and other native Internet institutions as a permanent multistakeholder institution.
Here’s what happened
As expected, the 20th anniversary of WSIS did not lead to the end of WSIS.
Instead, WSIS will continue for another 10 years. As for the IGF, the UN decided to make the IGF “a permanent forum of the United Nations.” The IGF will have a secretariat hosted by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA). It will be put “on a stable and sustainable basis with appropriate staffing and resources, in accordance with United Nations budgetary procedures.”
Here’s what is interesting about this decision. Instead of digital governance dialogue being hosted by an independent IGF run largely by nonstate actors, WSIS+20 outcome brings the IGF, and its multistakeholder governance dialogue, inside the multilateral system. It is now an official function of the UN bureaucracy. To understand the implications of this, we once again must put it in the context of the ongoing struggle between state-centric governance and self-governance by non-state actors.
Some states, particularly those in the G77 and China group, wanted to create a new, separate forum for governments only. Fortunately, that idea didn’t fly but led to a compromise in which there will be a governmental track within the IGF. But it will not be an isolated track, rather a place for states to talk to each other to come up with positions which will then be discussed among all the other stakeholder groups in the IGF. This, in our opinion, is not a bad idea, if it works as intended. It recognizes that governments alone do not make global digital policy as sovereigns, but are one of several stakeholder groups and will hold their inter-governmental dialogues in a multistakeholder context.
Internalizing IGF was seen by multistakeholder advocates as a way of encouraging governments to participate more actively in the IGF, thereby strengthening IGF and also encouraging more participation by the big tech corporations who would participate to gain access to governmental decision makers. Whether that will work or not remains to be seen. For states interested in strengthening their own role in digital governance, internalizing IGF was seen as a step toward the “enhanced cooperation” (among states) called for in the Tunis Agenda (paragraph 69). This outcome represents exactly the kind of compromise between the multilateral and multistakeholder regimes that has characterized WSIS since 2005.
The question is: will swallowing the IGF ingest a multistakeholder virus into the multilateral system, or will the digestion process make Internet governance more multilateral?
The Ghost of “Enhanced Cooperation”
The WSIS+20 outcome document reaffirms, repeatedly, “the working definition of Internet governance in the Tunis Agenda.” This definition formally endorsed “multistakeholder participation” but assigned different stakeholder groups different “roles and responsibilities.” This assignment of roles put governments totally in charge of something called “international Internet public policy issues.” The Tunis agenda, therefore, was not the ringing endorsement of multistakeholder governance that some folks made it out to be. It was a diplomatic compromise that papered over the conflict between the two governance models.
Keeping stakeholders “in their respective roles” was never a viable way of doing Internet governance, because there was no way to segregate these roles in practice.
The new outcome document exhibits this old blind spot. It contains no direct recognition of the well-established role of non-state actors in making public policy for the Internet’s domain name system, number resources, routing infrastructure, Web PKI, and content moderation. There is no formal recognition of the IANA transition, which ended U.S. unilateral control of the Internet’s domain name system, despite the centrality of the exceptional U.S. role to the controversies around the 2002 and 2005 WSIS meetings.
Instead, we get a revival of the call for “enhanced cooperation.” Enhanced cooperation is a vague term from the Tunis Agenda, defined as “enabl[ing] governments, on an equal footing, to carry out their roles and responsibilities in international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet…” In other words, it is an attempt to implement the distinct “role” given to sovereign states by the Tunis Agenda’s definition of Internet governance. Because that role segregation does not and cannot work, there has been little progress on Enhanced Cooperation. In 2015, ten years after WSIS, the lack of progress led the General Assembly to pass a resolution authorizing the Committee on Science and Technology for Development to form a Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation. It held a series of meetings from 2016 to 2018 which did not result in any substantive actions.
Will a reformed IGF, which creates a space for intergovernmental dialogue within the IGF, a multistakeholder forum with no policy-making power, satisfy the demand for “enhanced cooperation?” We will see. If not, the tension between sovereignty-based governance and bottom up, multistakeholder governance will continue. But the UN will have internalized the conflict.
References:
Outcome document of WSIS+20: https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/4095953
Outcome document of WSIS+10: https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/ares70d125_en.pdf
Tunis Agenda of 2005: https://www.itu.int/net/wsis/docs2/tunis/off/6rev1.html
The post WSIS+20: The UN Swallows the IGF appeared first on Internet Governance Project.
