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Wednesday, July 30, 2025

Tech­nol­o­gy Mat­ters

Beyond NetMundial: The future of Internet governance

De­bate con­tin­ues over who gov­erns the Net and how

by

20140515

NET­Mundi­al, the glob­al mul­ti-stake­hold­er meet­ing on the fu­ture of In­ter­net gov­er­nance, con­clud­ed re­cent­ly in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The non-bind­ing out­come of the meet­ing stressed on the pro­tec­tion of in­ter­me­di­aries, and called for greater co-op­er­a­tion "among all stake­hold­ers" but fell short of the ex­pec­ta­tions of some on key is­sues like net neu­tral­i­ty.

Dubbed the "world cup of In­ter­net gov­er­nance" a to­tal, 1,480 par­tic­i­pants from all stake­hold­er groups were phys­i­cal­ly present at Net­Mundi­al. There were joined by re­mote par­tic­i­pants in more than 30 hubs from 97 coun­tries around the world. The gath­er­ing fo­cused on the elab­o­ra­tion of prin­ci­ples and a roadmap for fu­ture de­vel­op­ment of the com­plex In­ter­net Gov­er­nance ecosys­tem.

NET­mundi­al had the am­bi­tious goal of bring­ing to­geth­er rep­re­sen­ta­tives of civ­il so­ci­ety, pri­vate sec­tor, acad­e­mia and tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ty to es­tab­lish strate­gic guide­lines re­lat­ed to the use and de­vel­op­ment of the In­ter­net in the world. The meet­ing took a com­mit­tees for­mat, each one with rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the in­volved stake­hold­ers; dis­tin­guished ex­perts aim­ing to give guide­lines and or­gan­ise the meet­ing.

The con­fer­ence was first pro­posed by Brazil Pres­i­dent Dil­ma Rouss­eff, against the back­drop of the rev­e­la­tions by Ed­ward Snow­den that the US's Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Agency had been spy­ing on its own cit­i­zens and oth­er coun­tries alike, in­clud­ing the per­son­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion of Pres­i­dent Rouss­eff. Doc­u­ments re­leased by Snow­den had al­leged that In­ter­net com­pa­nies like Face­book and Google had giv­en the NSA re­al-time ac­cess to con­tent on their servers.

In a heat­ed state­ment at the UN Gen­er­al As­sem­bly in Sep­tem­ber 2013, the Brazil­ian pres­i­dent called for the UN to over­see a new glob­al le­gal sys­tem to gov­ern the In­ter­net. Rouss­eff's state­ments were un­equiv­o­cal: "In the ab­sence of the right to pri­va­cy, there can be no true free­dom of ex­pres­sion and opin­ion, and there­fore no ef­fec­tive democ­ra­cy" and "Tam­per­ing in such a man­ner in the af­fairs of oth­er coun­tries is a breach of in­ter­na­tion­al law and is an af­front of the prin­ci­ples that must guide the re­la­tions among them, es­pe­cial­ly among friend­ly na­tions. The right to safe­ty of cit­i­zens of one coun­try can nev­er be guar­an­teed by vi­o­lat­ing fun­da­men­tal hu­man rights of cit­i­zens of an­oth­er coun­try."

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