insight 

We were involved in the recent launch of the UK Internet Governance Forum at an event in Parliament attended by over 100 people from industry, government, parliament, academia and civil society. The launch event featured a report from the Internet Governance Forum in Rio last November; a plan of action up until the next IGF meeting in India and beyond; the launch of Nominet’s Best Practice Challenge 2008 and a debate on the future of the Internet.

The UK Internet Governance Forum is a collaborative partnership between Nominet, the UK Department for Business and key parliamentarians. Its aim is to provide a local forum in the UK to engage industry, government, parliament, academia and civil society in debate on Internet Governance issues, stimulating partnerships and coalitions to deliver solutions and demonstrating best practice for others to learn from.

Other influential stakeholder groups that are taking part include the London Internet Exchange, the Coalition on Internet Safety and Amnesty International.

One of the key messages to emerge from the first UK IGF meeting is that the UK is taking a leading role in Internet governance, and that other countries are seeing what we are doing and beginning to start running their own processes at the national level. Brazil, France and Finland are among the first countries to follow the UK’s ‘best practice’ model. The UK is proving to the rest of the world that the Internet Governance Forum works, as a collaborative partnership between Government, business, civil society and academia, because it is not subject to Government legislation and is free from bureaucracy.

The UK IGF will concentrate on developing examples of UK best practice and serve as a potential prototype model for other national IGFs. Rt Hon Alun Michael MP commented that Tanya Byron’s recent review of the online child protection sphere has highlighted successful partnership initiatives in that area, particularly between the Internet Watch Foundation and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Unit. They have successfully combined resources and expertise from law enforcement, Industry and the third sector, while working closely with the Home Office’s Online Child Protection Task Force.

This kind of precedent paves the way for a cooperative template to be applied in the field of Internet governance. The key projects for the UK IGF going forwards will be to explore UK concerns around the IGF themes of security, diversity, access and openness at a seminar in May, and then to identify the UK’s best practice agenda for the IGF in Hydrabad at the awards ceremony for Nominet’s Best Practice Challenge in July.

We would encourage UK companies and organisations to send us their entries – the closing date is 25 April 2008. Winning entries will be announced at an awards ceremony in July 2008 and invited to a leading role in the UK preparatory meeting for the Internet Governance Forum meeting in India.