Athens hosts UN-sponsored meeting on future of internet

30/10/2006

Openness and security are among the issues on the agenda of a four-day Internet Governance Forum that opened in Athens on Monday.

(ANA-MPA, BBC, Swissinfo, The New York Times - 30/10/06; AP, ANA-MPA - 29/10/06; UN - 25/10/06; The Internet Governance Forum Web Site; Internet Governance Forum Greece 2006)

Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis opened the forum on Monday (October 30th). [Getty Images]

More than 1,200 representatives of governments and international organisations, corporate executives, IT specialists and academics are attending the first-ever Internet Governance Forum (IGF), which opened in Athens on Monday (October 30th).

The four-day, UN-sponsored event is not aimed at adopting specific decisions, but at providing a venue for stakeholders to reach consensus on a number of issues relating to the future of the internet.

"The forum will give voice to the citizens of the global net and help identify emerging issues which need to be tackled in the formal processes," Nitin Desai, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's Special Adviser for Internet Governance and chairman of the organising body for the IGF, told the BBC ahead of the meeting.

The inception of the IGF was one of the most important results of the November 2005 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis.

"In this first IGF meeting, we expect to set the scene and establish a solid and comprehensive framework and network to focus on issues such as affordability and availability of the internet; interconnection costs and security; management of critical resources and technology transfer; multilingualism and local development of software; capacity building and participation of multi-stakeholders from developing countries," Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis said as he opened the forum.

Other speakers at the opening session included Desai, Greek Minister of Transport and Communications Michalis Liapis, International Telecommunication Union Secretary General Yoshio Utsumi, EU Commissioner for Information Society and the Media Viviane Reding and Guy Sebban, the secretary general of the International Chamber of Commerce.

The overarching theme of the conference is "Internet Governance for Development". The agenda is structured along four broad themes -- openness, security, diversity and access. A total of 36 workshops will focus on specific issues related to those themes and on other topics of relevance to Internet Governance.

After the opening ceremony, participants were scheduled to hold a general session on multi-stakeholder policy dialogue, which should set the scene for the discussion regarding institutional and substantive issues.

On Tuesday, the participants will focus on openness and security. The specific issues to be dealt with in the workshops under those two themes include free flow of information, freedom of expression, empowerment and access to knowledge, protecting users from spam, phishing and viruses while protecting privacy, cyber crime and protection of data.

The other two broader themes -- diversity and access -- would be discussed on Wednesday. Workshops will focus on 15 different specific issues, including content creation, human rights and the internet, free flow of information in cyberspace and linguistic diversity.

After a review of the work of the previous days, the forum will close on Thursday with a panel of young people who will look at emerging issues and issues of concern to youth, both from a technology and public policy perspective.

"The IGF meeting in Athens can be considered a success if a fair proportion of those attending go away with some preconception changed, or, better still, some ideas about how they will work differently in their area of responsibility," Desai wrote in an article the BBC carried on Monday. "The measure of success would be a notch higher if some practical partnerships emerge in the interstices of the meetings. But the best measure of success is if those who come to Athens choose to come again to the 2007 IGF in Brazil, the 2008 IGF in India and the 2009 IGF in Egypt."