We’ve been taking an active role in global Internet governance for well over a decade. While we might be based in Ireland, policy decisions taken on the other side of the planet can have repercussions on us. The Internet is not local or national – it’s international and global, so many of the policies and norms tend to be replicated across the globe. While some of these policies can have a positive impact, sadly many of them can be flawed. Naturally the ones we end up focussing our time and energy on are those that can have detrimental impacts on us and our clients.
The UN is currently working on the “Global Digital Compact” which is an initiative to establish shared principles for a secure, open, and equitable digital future, set to be formalised in 2024.
We believe in a global, open, interoperable and resilient Internet. We also believe in the importance of putting multi-stakeholder Internet governance at the centre. Policy makers might have the best intentions in the world, but without the involvement of other stakeholders (beyond government) policy development could be divorced from reality.
We were delighted to join a coalition of companies and organisations from the technical community who submitted a statement to the recent consultation. The statement, which you can read here (PDF), is supportive of the work so far, but highlights a number of areas for improvement including:
- clear inclusion of well-established terminology like “global”, “open”, “interoperable” and “resilient”.
- emphasise “multistakeholder Internet governance”
- ensure that dialogue around the Internet’s future take place in multistakeholder fora and not in multilateral ones
The full list of signatories is:
- Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC)
- Associação DNS.PT, Portuguese Registry
- au Domain Administration
- Blacknight
- Canadian Internet Registration Authority
- DENIC eG
- GoDaddy
- IE Domain Registry CLG, trading as .ie
- InternetNZ
- Japan Registry Services Co., Ltd
- NIC Costa Rica the ccTLD for .cr
- Nominet
- Public Interest Registry
- Tucows Domains
Denic have done a nice write up on the statement as well as talking about some other ongoing IG activity.
About the Author: Michele Neylon
