The governance of the internet has gained a central role in global politics. International cooperation is increasingly mobilized to ensure that the expansion of connectivity infrastructure, digital services and their usages also safeguards security, human rights, and economic benefits.
The field has become truly transnational, including a vibrant stakeholder community that plays an active role in novel diplomatic practices in negotiating technical standards, norms, regulations, and policies in the intersection of national and global priorities.
The UN World Summit on the Information Society established in 2005 that internet governance processes should be institutionalized in an open and inclusive manner. Since then, multistakeholder participation along this line has characterized several initiatives by the UN and its agencies in the internet governance field, the latest to date being the IGF Leadership Panel inaugurated in 2022.
Considering the deep digital transformations that, at the crossroad of globalization and digitization, affect every aspect of current social, economic and political life, this event aims at discussing still unresolved issues and highly sensitive global internet governance challenges, and how these transformations unfold to impact national sovereignty, international relations and the global political economy.