What is and why internet governance?

President Kenyatta and First Lady Margaret Kenyatta are conducted on a tour of Tianjin Yingdak Company Limited in Tianjin, China. in this file photo. FILE 

 

In Summary

By John Walubengo
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Two weeks ago, the Africa Internet Governance Forum (Af-IGF) delegates converged at Multimedia University of Kenya, Nairobi with hardly any mention in the mainstream media.

Around two hundred delegates from across Africa and belonging to different stakeholder groups such as government, academia, civil society, private sector amongst others met to deliberate on the burning issues affecting and arising from the evolution of the internet.

By definition, Internet Governance can be as abstract as it can get. Its relevance is even more remote to the regular internet user who simply wants to access and read mail, Facebook or twitter. And indeed why should one care about the governance of a system that is apparently working seamlessly – at least better than the local public utilities?

The short answer is that we should care because the internet is the new frontier, the ultimate and final real-estate, the new platform for wealth creation.

In the history of civilisation, nations fought over new lands, conquered and occupied them in order to increase their wealth and domination.

Today as we speak, these battles continue online, with the new land being the digital superhighway – otherwise known as the internet. The nation that holds the greatest influence on when, where and how the internet evolves essentially has the advantage in as far as increasing its wealth and domination over the others is concerned.

At the moment, these nations are largely in the North, led of course by the USA.

By virtue of having developed the original “Internet”, the US is first amongst equals in as far as the development and control of the Internet is concerned.

However, by virtue of the internet having matured into a global resource with more of its users being outside rather than inside the US, this oversight control the US enjoys over the internet has increasingly become a contentious issue.

Other nations and non-state actors are demanding a more equitable and distributed approach to the management and evolution of the Internet.

This is what Internet Governance is all about. The deliberate effort to see a more open and transparent internet whose evolution and management is accountable to a wider group of stakeholders that includes government, academia, civil society, private sector, media amongst others.

Whereas the Internet Governance discourse happens at a global level during the annual UN-Internet Governance Forum, its thematic issues are partly informed by national, regional and continental internet governance forums.

The African Internet Governance Forum held at Multimedia University was such a continental forum where issues such as cybercrime, access and diversity on the internet, enhanced corporation amongst other were discussed
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These issues are important even at a local level and and the resolutions reached will form a small step towards increasing the African voice in the ongoing internet governance discourse whose global conference is scheduled to take place in Bali, Indonesia later in the month.