Europeans Aim for Balance in Global Internet Governance Parley

Everybody who’s anybody in the world of Internet governance is in Brazil this week for NetMundial, a two-day meeting in São Paulo essentially about stripping the U.S. of some of its control over the Internet.

There’ll be 800 delegates there and plenty more watching online. Europeans are heading over in great numbers. Those speaking on the first day include EU tech chief Neelie Kroes, Carl Bildt, Sweden’s outspoken minister of foreign affairs, France’s secretary of state for digital affairs Axelle Lemaire, and, representing academia, Tim Berners-Lee, the Brit who invented the World Wide Web; he’ll be addressing the event’s opening ceremony along with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and others.

On the agenda at NetMundial is a plan for how the Internet will be overseen globally in the future. While the U.S. Commerce Department said last month that it will stop supervising the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), there’s a heated discussion about who should take over.

Some countries, like Russia and China, want the United Nations to play a bigger role; Europe wants a more broad-based approach, with a role for civil society, academia, and others as well as governments. European delegates, in general, are seeking to find a middle ground as the U.S. relaxes control over some areas, and keen to emphasize the value of safeguarding human rights online.

Another European making the journey to Sao Paulo is Luigi Gambardella, the executive chair of the European Telecommunications Network Operators (ETNO) association, which represents the bloc’s biggest Internet providers.

“It is now time to live up to the promise of a more open Internet governance model,” Mr Gambardella said. “Building a better Internet for all also depends on our ability to innovate and invest in cutting edge networks… We believe the Internet should be economically sustainable, interconnected, safe, resilient and secure”.

ETNO wants a clear timeline for the globalisation of ICANN functions, as well as a clear set of principles for Internet governance to come out of the meeting. Christoph Steck, Mr. Gambardella’s colleague who has been working with the NetMundial committee, said human rights matter too.

“We should aim at few rather than many principles, and they should be shared by all stakeholders and governments,” he said. “We should guarantee that people have the same rights online as they do offline.”

Of course, individual countries are sending representatives as well.

The UK government told Digits the event is an “opportunity to develop and strengthen global consensus on the multi-stakeholder model of internet governance… We welcome the emphasis in discussion leading up to the meeting on a distributed, multi-stakeholder model, maintaining a single un-fragmented internet, capacity-building, freedom of expression and encouraging diversity.”