United Nations Internet Governance Forum 2024

One of the last key events of 2024 was the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, with the overarching theme of “Building our Multistakeholder Digital Future.” The five-day-long policy forum, which took place in December, had 300+ sessions and over 11,000 participants from 140 countries. Over the course of the week, there were sessions, workshops, and events discussing issues relating to four key topics: harnessing innovation and balancing risks in the digital space; enhancing the digital contribution to peace, development and sustainability; advancing human rights and inclusion in the digital age; and improving digital governance for the Internet we want. 

2025 is set to be another busy year for the multistakeholder model, so we thought we’d look back at internet governance over the last two decades before signposting what’s coming up.  

What is Internet Governance? 

For most people, internet governance is something they have never thought about, and they probably never needed to, so let’s start by considering what internet governance is. If you have ready access to the internet, it’s easy to take it for granted. We simply access the content we want on our smartphone, and with the swipe of a screen, we are interacting with friends, family, media, and business. Not being connected can be a huge disadvantage and prevent people from accessing the benefits of education, employment, healthcare, and commerce.  

At a recent event, I heard the analogy that the internet, as a layer of technical infrastructure, is essentially the foundation upon which content is built, much like the foundations of a house being the layer upon which the rest of the structure sits. These foundations are what many companies and organisations have built their brands on. It’s how they deliver their goods and services to their customers in a similar way to a brick-and-mortar shop on the high street. Internet governance is what keeps these foundations stable, safe, and secure.  

For the past twenty years, people from a broad range of stakeholder groups, representing the technical community, private commerce, governments, civil society, and many more, have actively thought about internet governance, discussed it, and engaged in multistakeholder dialogue in regional, national, and global forums.  

One of those forums is the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), a UN-mandated forum that first took place in Athens in 2006. The 19th IGF took place during the week of 15 December, but what were its origins?    

Key Milestones of Internet Governance 

To understand where the IGF came from, we have to go back in time to the dawn of a new millennium! I’m old enough to remember the comparisons to the ‘Wild West’ as the digital revolution really gained pace, and we saw the .com boom in 2000. Governments had already started to realise that there were huge opportunities in this new technology but that it presented challenges, too. They could see a digital divide emerging, which posed the threat that developing nations would be left behind in their adoption of technology.   

This concern was one of the reasons a proposal to hold a World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was put forward at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Plenipotentiary Conference in 1998. The first phase of the WSIS took place in 2003 in Geneva with the second phase taking place in 2005 in Tunis. The summit, sponsored by the United Nations, was to look at digital issues, and the output was several ‘Action Lines,’ which are key principles for building inclusive information and knowledge societies and focused on a broad range of issues such as capacity building, access, and international and regional cooperation. From the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society came a mandate for a new multistakeholder forum to be created with the purpose of discussing public policy issues relating to internet governance — from this mandate, the IGF was created.   

The first IGF took place in Athens in 2006 and has taken place annually since then. The purpose of the IGF is to provide an environment where all stakeholders can gather to debate Internet policy issues and share best practices so that they can learn from one another. There was never an intention that it would be a decision-making body but rather that ideas and policies could be adapted and implemented at a regional and national level.  

WSIS+10 took place in 2015 with the objective of reviewing the outcomes of the 2005 WSIS, and we are now preparing for WSIS+20, which will take place this year. WSIS+20 will review the implementation of the WSIS outcomes and whether to renew the mandate for the IGF. The opportunity to provide feedback on this point has encouraged stakeholders to reflect on what the IGF has achieved over time, so let’s take a look.  

What has the Internet Governance Forum Achieved? 

The nature of the IGF as a non-decision-making body can make it challenging to measure its value, impact, and output. However, stakeholders have been gathering evidence of the impact of the IGF in order to feed that into the consultation process in support of the renewal of the IGF mandate. In fact, some parties want to go beyond a mandate for renewal and would like to see a permanent mandate for the IGF as an output of WSIS+20.  

The UK Department of Science, Innovation and Technology commissioned the DNS Research Federation to carry out a study to review the impact of the IGF over the last ten years since the WSIS+10 review. The report found that the IGF had both a direct impact and an indirect impact. The evidence showed an increase in the number of Internet Exchange Points in Africa, the facilitation of the establishment of global community networks that increase the availability of affordable access to the internet in underserved areas, a greater voice in policy discussions for young people, and the creation of regional and national IGFs such as the UK IGF. Indirect impacts included raising awareness of emerging policy issues and providing a space in which stakeholders from a broad range of groups, including the Global South, can input into and influence global policy discussions. The IGF has played a fundamental role in highlighting the benefits of multistakeholder dialogue. Whilst multistakeholderism may not be suited to tackling all issues relating to the internet it has been a key facilitator of internet governance dialogue for the past 20 years. 

Multistakeholderism and the Threats to It 

Multistakeholderism includes stakeholders from different sectors and communities, for example, technology, governments, the private sector, civil society, law enforcement, and academia. It provides an opportunity for all stakeholders to collaborate and have a voice in the development of policy that impacts them. This model can benefit the world of technological innovation where traditional governance models can struggle to keep pace with the adoption and use of emerging technology — Artificial Intelligence (AI) being a recent example.  

Global digital issues have become increasingly more important to governments who are more familiar with a ‘top down’ approach to policy development than the concept of multistakeholderism. The UN’s Global Digital Compact (GDC) negotiation process this year (a framework for global governance of digital technology and AI) received criticism because the 193 Member States formally drove it and there was limited opportunity for non-governmental groups to participate in the process. The negotiation process demonstrated that there are global voices, particularly from governments, that would prefer to have greater control through regulation rather than multistakeholder debate. Putting government voices and geo-political issues front and centre presents a threat to the stability of internet governance and, in turn, could threaten the stability of the foundation layer and everything built on top of it.  

Some commentators believe that the GDC was a warm-up for the WSIS+20 review, which, in some part, concerns them because of the opaque process and lack of multistakeholder input. Whilst stakeholders welcomed the GDC outcomes that recognised the technical community as a stakeholder, multistakeholderism, and support for the IGF, they are not taking for granted that an outcome of the WSIS+20 review will be a renewal of the IGF mandate.   

The Future of Internet Governance 

The WSIS+20 review process is, first and foremost, run by governments and diplomats as a multilateral negotiated process. A government negotiated document will be produced as the outcome and until stakeholders see that output, we won’t really be sure of its content.   

The UK Government, for one, considers the WSIS to be a big issue on the agenda. In a speech at the UKIGF, Baroness Jones of Whitchurch, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Future Digital Economy and Online Safety, described the WSIS as the primary process on information technology and internet governance.  

In preparation for the WSIS+20 next year, there are various coordination groups working on providing input through the appropriate channels that Markmonitor is engaged with. ICANN set up the WSIS+20 Outreach Network to coordinate efforts leading up to the review, and internet governance has been a key agenda item for discussion by the ICANN community. In addition, a Technical Community Coalition for Multistakeholderism (TCCM) was established in early 2024 by the ccTLD registries auDA (.au), CIRA (.ca), InternetNZ (.nz), and Nominet (.uk).  The coalition’s members (including Markmonitor) come from the internet’s technical community and have a common goal: to support and defend multistakeholder Internet governance.  

Markmonitor takes an active role in internet governance through our participation in ICANN, where we are key contributors in the policy development work of the Generic Names Supporting Organisation (GNSO) and Brand Registry Group (BRG). We will also continue to monitor the WSIS+20 review through our engagement with the ICANN WSIS+20 Outreach Network and the TCCM.  

For now, the technical community is recognised as a stakeholder and does have a voice in positively influencing internet policy. We will continue to use this opportunity to advocate for our clients’ views. 

Markmonitor’s Global Industry Relations (GIR) Team will keep you updated on relevant developments throughout 2025. In the meantime, if you would like further information, please reach out to me directly or contact your DPA, who can connect you with the GIR Team.