United Nations agrees to persist with multi-stakeholder internet governance

The United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday reached consensus on a review of the world’s internet governance arrangements and preserved the current multi-stakeholder model that means governments are just one of many voices that debate the future of the internet.

Wednesday’s session caps a process that started in 2003, when the UN convened the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), a forum for discussing the role of technology in society.

The first WSIS process saw participating nations pledge “to build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented information society, where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge.” It also saw participating nations agree to the multi-stakeholder internet governance arrangements that persist to this day, and which sees organizations like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet Society (ISOC), and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) each ...