Good morning Chair, co-facilitators, all,
We are members of the Internet’s technical community: the companies, organizations, groups and actors whose day-to-day job is to operate the critical infrastructure and services at the heart of the Internet.
Members of our coalition – a ‘Technical Community Coalition for Multistakeholderism’ recently issued a joint statement expressing concerns around the Global Digital Compact process. This statement expressed our desire to better understand how views put forward through multistakeholder consultations – such as this one – meaningfully contribute to the further textual revisions to the GDC, as well as concerns related to the transparency and openness of the process. We call on the Co-Facilitators of this process to address these points, and in particular to publish the further schedule, to aid meaningful input and global participation from all stakeholders into this process. We believe that good process is critical to ensuring the final version of the Compact has the buy-in of all stakeholders.
We have seen widespread support for multistakeholder Internet governance across all stakeholder consultations, and strong advocacy from many Member States. Despite this, there is potential that such support will not be reflected in the agreed-upon Compact. We would once again like to reiterate that multistakeholder Internet governance should involve all stakeholder groups – governments, civil society, academia, the private sector and the technical community – in policy decisions about how the operational aspects of the Internet are managed, on equal footing. The technological success of the Internet is a direct result of this multistakeholder approach, and this approach enables a level of diversity, accountability and transparency that cannot be replicated in intergovernmental environments alone.
We would also like to join many other stakeholders in cautioning against new multilateral initiatives proposed by the GDC that would duplicate existing work, and to once again call for the bolstering of existing multistakeholder initiatives including those created through the WSIS outcomes, in particular the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). We continue to believe that the IGF should remain the primary multi-stakeholder dialogue about the Internet and play a key role in the implementation and follow-up on the GDC.
It is only through regular and meaningful involvement of all stakeholder groups in the Compact’s development that we can successfully achieve its stated goal of “shared principles for an open, free and secure digital future for all”.
List of organizations signing on
- Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC)
- .au Domain Administration (auDA)
- Blacknight
- Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA)
- DENIC eG
- DNS Africa Ltd
- DotAsia Organisation (.asia)
- GoDaddy
- InternetNZ (.nz)
- IE Domain Registry CLG (.ie)
- Japan Network Information Center (JPNIC)
- Japan Registry Services Co., Ltd. (JPRS)
- Kenya Network Information Centre (KeNIC)
- Network Information Center Costa Rica (NIC Costa Rica)
- Nominet UK
- Norid (.no)
- Public Interest Registry (PIR)
- Taiwan Network Information Center (TWNIC)
- Tucows