Thematic Deep-Dive: Data protection

Guiding questions:

  1. Art. 17 ICCPR recognizes the individual right to privacy. How can governments, data protection authorities’ private companies, the scientific community and civil society work together to ensure personal data is processed, stored, secured and protected against misuse?
  2. What principles would support quality and interoperable data so that governments, international organizations, the private sector, civil society and individuals can contribute to and benefit from digital trade and economy and leave no one behind?
  3. Data is a key enabler of innovation and research. How can stakeholders leverage tools such as (pseudo)anonymization,1 encryption, portability, etc. to drive innovation and interoperability while protecting personal data?

Thematic Deep-Dive: Internet governance

Guiding questions:

  • Over the last twenty years the share of world’s population connected to the internet has more than quadrupled. New internet-based tools – from the smartphone to social media – have emerged and we are moving into an Internet of Things. How can we continue to ensure the unfragmented safe, global, secure, and inclusive internet?
  • The 2005 Tunis Agenda endorsed a multi-stakeholder approach to the governance of the internet. How have we succeeded in realizing vision? How do the roles and functions of various multi-stakeholder forums such as ICANN, IETF and the IGF come together to support internet governance? And how can they be strengthened?
  • How can governments, technical standard bodies, civil society, industry and all stakeholders work together for an open, indivisible, free, interoperable, global, secure, inclusive Internet?

Thematic Deep-Dive: Digital inclusion and connectivity

Guiding questions:

  1. How can governments, international organizations, private companies, and civil society work together to close the digital divide and improve access, skills, and meaningful connectivity for all?
  2. What actions should be taken to enable digital inclusion for all?
  3. What policies, frameworks and programs have proven to be most successful and should be scaled up and adapted to other contexts to foster digital inclusion?

Digital Cooperation Timeline

After several meetings in 2004 and 2005, the Working Group on Internet Governance issues its report which: (a) proposes a working definition for internet governance; (b) identifies public policy issues that are relevant to internet governance; and (c) explores the roles and responsibilities of various actors (governments, the private sector, civil society, as well as academia and the technical community) in internet governance. The group also suggests the creation of a multistakeholder forum for dialogue on internet-related public policy issues.

Explore Global Digital Compact

After several meetings in 2004 and 2005, the Working Group on Internet Governance issues its report which: (a) proposes a working definition for internet governance; (b) identifies public policy issues that are relevant to internet governance; and (c) explores the roles and responsibilities of various actors (governments, the private sector, civil society, as well as academia and the technical community) in internet governance. The group also suggests the creation of a multistakeholder forum for dialogue on internet-related public policy issues.

Appointment of IGF Leadership Panel

Building on the Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, the UN Secretary-General appoints an inaugural Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Leadership Panel as ‘a strategic, empowered, and multistakeholder body to support and strengthen the IGF’. The Panel’s key functions are to: provide strategic inputs and advice on the IGF; promote the IGF and its outputs; support both high-level and at-large stakeholder engagement in the IGF and IGF fundraising efforts; and exchange IGF outputs from the Forum with other stakeholders and relevant fora and facilitate the feeding of input of these decision-makers and fora to the IGF’s agenda-setting process.