The World Economic Forum on Thursday launched a new initiative on Internet governance cooperation, which will provide a venue for leaders from many regions and sectors of society to discuss and address a range of emerging policy challenges related to Internet.
Through close collaboration with key government, industry, academic and civil society partners, the initiative seeks to provide an international, multi-stakeholder platform to sustain and strengthen an effective and distributed approach to Internet governance.
It called for building trust in the Internet and its governance ecosystem, identifying a set of emerging non-technical policy challenges and addressing them through global cooperation, informing and undertaking capacity development initiatives to ensure global participation in Internet cooperation, especially from under-represented regions and sectors.
“The Internet is one of the key catalysts for global transformations,” Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the Forum said in a statement.
He highlighted the new initiative will provide a platform for dialogue among governmental, business and other leaders to safeguard the Internet, and preserve it as a shared global resource for human solidarity and economic progress.
Meanwhile, the initiative aims to support a broader policy dialogue on issues that would benefit from the engagement of additional relevant ministries, industries and academic and civil society expertise beyond those specializing in the ICT sector and participating regularly in traditional Internet governance fora.
In addition, it serves as a platform for galvanizing support for capacity building to support developing countries that wish to enhance their access to the Internet and build their own multi-stakeholder governance frameworks, and to explore ways to strengthen the capacity of the decentralized Internet governance ecosystem to respond to specific issues or problems that arise.