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The United Nations’ proposed Global Digital Compact will exclude technical experts as a distinct voice in internet governance, ignoring their enormous contributions to growing and sustaining the internet, according to ICANN and two of the world’s regional internet registries. From a report: The Global Digital Compact is an effort to “outline shared principles for an open, free and secure digital future for all.” The UN hopes the compact will address issues such as digital inclusion, internet fragmentation, giving individuals control over how their data is used, and making the internet trustworthy “by introducing accountability criteria for discrimination and misleading content.” But ICANN, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), and the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) worry that recent articulations of the Compact suggest it should use a tripartite model for digital cooperation with three stakeholder groups: the private sector, governments, and civil society. That’s dangerous, ICANN and co argue, because technical stakeholders would lose their distinct voice.
They’ve therefore co-signed and published a document criticizing the Compact as it stands today. “The technical community is not part of civil society and it has never been,” the document states, citing outcomes of the World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS) — a UN event staged in 2003 and 2005 that defined a multi-stakeholder internet governance framework. 2015’s WSIS+10 event affirmed that strategy. “This model excludes the technical community as a distinct component, and overlooks the unique and essential roles played by that community’s members separately and collectively,” DNS overlord ICANN and the registries added.
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