The Future Of The Internet Will Be Discussed In New York, This Week. But Nobody Seems To Care

Government officials from more than 190 countries will meet next Tuesday in New York for a two-day discussion (the United Nations' 10 Year Review of the World Summit on the Information Society, or WSIS+10 Review) that could, in principle, have a huge influence on how the Internet is governed for the next decade.

Still, nobody seems to be talking about that very much. Maybe, no one really cares. Which would be a shame, because some issues have been around for a while now, and should be addressed without further delays.

One of them, the crucial one, concerns the choice between two different approaches to Internet governance. The first, usually referred to as the "multistakeholder approach", and prevailing so far, is based on the involvement of the private sector, the civil society, the international organizations and the academia in all decisions regarding the Internet.

The other, the "multilateral", gives more powers and discretionality to the governments. This might sound like a boring discussion, but is, in fact, fundamental to the future of the Internet. That is, to our future.

"There is still an ongoing debate over this question of whether the internet and the policy environment for the internet should be multilateral or multistakeholder. That continues to be the sticking point for many countries," the Internet Society's VP of Global Policy Sally Wentworth says.

The Society is an organization formed in 1992 by two of the “Fathers of the Internet”, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn to protect and promote the open Internet and has been always very active in pursuing this mission.

So far, the dominant approach to Internet Governance has been mainly multistakeholder, but things are changing fast. Many governments are determined to get more control over their networks.

This became apparent after the Snowden revelations showed how the U.S. intelligence was spying top representatives of other countries: Germany, Brazil and other countries, a new wave of "data protectionism" ensued, raising fears of the so-called Balkanization of the Internet.

More recently, the terror attacks in Paris prompted France and other States to call for a stricter control of the open Web, and greater powers for governments.

In-between the multilaterals and the multistakeholders, sit those that believe in a possible third way. "There's now a distinction being raised between, on the one hand, some would concede well the technical operations of the internet should be multistakeholder, but policies related to the internet should be the domain of governments and should be multilateral," Wenworth tells me.

This is not, you might have guessed, the position of the Society. Together with over 200 other organizations and individuals - ranging from 21st Century Fox to the EFF, Deutsche Telekom , Ericsson , and many others - it signed a couple of weeks ago a joint statement, asking the leaders and governments participating in the WSIS+10 review, to safeguard the "principles of collaboration, openness, transparency and inclusiveness that have allowed the Internet to flourish" and that are a distinctive feature of the multistakeholder approach.

"The networks are largely held in private hands. They're not managed by governments. So, you need industry at the table. You need the technical expertise of the engineers who are building the networks of the future. You need the users. There's a lot of innovation happening at the user level that needs to be taken into account," Wenworth says, "While governments must have a seat at the table, of course, this needs to be a collaborative effort if we're going to get to the solutions to the hard problems."

In this respect, the renewal of the Internet Governance Forum mandate for another ten years, as suggested in paragraph 62 of the latest draft, might prove instrumental.

Other, less controversial points, include the need for bridging the many forms of digital divides which remain both between and within countries as well as between women and men. Latest figures show that only 41 per cent of women have internet access (even less, according to some studies), and an estimated 80 per cent of online content is available in only one of 10 languages. The divide in connectivity options between the rich and the poor of the planet is still strong: two thirds of the population residing in developing countries remain offline.

So it's perhaps unsurprising in the WSIS+10 Review draft to find a call "for a significant increase in access to ICTs and to provide universal and affordable access to the Internet to all." What remains to be seen, is how the U.N is planning to achieve this goal and how governmental efforts would compete or complement private initiatives like Facebook's Internet.org.

The social network have been often criticized for providing only a subset of the Internet to people in developing countries, not to mention its own interest in opening new markets for its services, but it's a matter of fact that at least is doing something, while public efforts seem often hampered by delays, bureaucracy and limited resources.

Another aspect that the document's draft fails to consider, or touches only very lightly, is that of net neutrality. Far from mentioning it as a pillar of the open Internet, it just recognizes "the importance of the ongoing dialogue on net neutrality (...) in the context of the Information Society."

There's room for improvement, to say the least.