No one will complain about the operation of the 2025 Internet Governance Forum. The Norwegians did everything right. Even their controversial decision to offer a rather small number of workshop rooms turned out rather well: it gave us a smaller number of better-attended, easier to find and (usually, but not always) better quality presentations. The meeting felt a bit more focused. The city, Lillestrom, was close enough to Oslo to encourage social and leisure activity in a broader urban area, but far enough away to give the conference space its own identity. Even the shorter lead time was, in this writer’s opinion, a net positive: it forced everyone to tighten their processes and move faster.
An Internet Governance Forum is supposed to be more than a pleasant experience, however. The convergence of a transnational Internet community around IGF helps to spread knowledge, build connections and develop some rudimentary forms of policy cooperation or norm consensus. Everyone now is slowly getting the point that what we used to call “Internet Governance” has become a place to engage in policy discussions for the entire digital ecosystem: data governance, software and applications (including AI), semiconductors as well as digital connectivity.
Critical questions
IGF 2025 felt like one of the more consequential IGFs because of its engagement with an existential question: will WSIS be renewed by the UN General Assembly? If so, what happens next? Do we just continue doing the same thing for another 5, 10, 20 years? Who really wants that, except perhaps for a small number of people whose salaries or consulting projects depend on it? But if WSIS is not renewed, what happens to the IGF, which everyone wants to continue? How would a non-renewal affect the different communities of actors who congregate around the IGF? How closely tied is the fate of the IGF to a UN decision to renew or extend WSIS? Can IGF become permanent but independent of the UN, just as ICANN became independent of the United States Government? These questions hung over the proceedings.
End WSIS?
Leading into the IGF 2025, IGP published a call to openly discuss whether WSIS should end. We also put together a panel discussion/debate at the GigaNet symposium, which can be watched here. While the voices favoring an End to WSIS are in the minority, our provocation forced everyone to pay attention to the questions posed above. Many participants now recognize that WSIS needs to be reformed or improved if it is renewed. We also succeeded in refuting some of the false narratives. There were people who believed that the independent Internet institutions (ICANN, IETF, RIRs) need some form of recognition and approval from the United Nations. The Internet Society, normally an organization that supports the independence of the Internet from governments, seems to have taken this view.
In our debate at GigaNet, panelist Alexander Klimburg made the reasoning behind this view wonderfully explicit: “WSIS indirectly legitimizes ICANN and IANA,” he said, and without WSIS, there would be ”no legal basis for ICANN.” These assertions were easily exposed as incorrect, and revealed the community’s lack of knowledge about the very institutions they think they defending. ICANN’s legal basis is California nonprofit public benefit law. The corporation and its empowered community are governed by its bylaws. Neither the UN, nor a mere political declaration like the WSIS resolutions, can eliminate or affect ICANN’s legal basis. They simply have no power over it. And as our paper noted, WSIS did not legitimize ICANN and IANA, the 2016 transition did.
Do we need recognition from the UN?
But Klimburg’s over-extended claims reflected the real concerns of many in the Internet institutions. The reason ICANN and the other internet institutions are apologists for the WSIS process is that they really do seem to fear for their own authority and legitimacy when challenged by states. They would see the active ending of WSIS by the UN General Assembly as the multilateral system sending a signal of hostility to the global governance institutions run by non-state actors.
In my view, these fears are unwarranted. ICANN, the RIRs and the IETF are well-established institutions. They have self-sustaining ecosystems of business, policy making, and technical coordination. They play an important role in enabling global Internet connectivity, and in advancing effective,, beneficial and non-destructive forms of governance. This is not 2002. No major actor or group of state actors is trying to get rid of ICANN or ICANN’s DNS root. No one wants to get rid of the IETF. Most governments recognize the functional utility of a neutral, globalized standards organizations and coordination of Internet connectivity.
Whatever threats to Internet self-governance do exist, we know that the UN itself – or the presence or absence of WSIS – is not one of them. No UN agency – the General Assembly, the Director-General’s Secretariat, the congeries of specialized UN agencies occupied with the “action lines” of WSIS – has any real power over the global Internet governance institutions.
The real threat
If there is a threat to Internet self-governance, it comes from national governments, especially ones with large internal markets. As we learned from GDPR, the U.S. export controls on semiconductors, or the Chinese data localization requirements, states’ national security fears can trigger unilateral actions that affect the global digital ecosystem in harmful ways. Digital neo-mercantilism and efforts to be “digitally sovereign” push states to enhance their power over the digital relative to other states. In geopolitical games of this sort, multilateral institutions are not the primary vehicle for cooperation, diplomacy or bargaining.
If ICANN has developed a realistic and well-informed threat and vulnerability analysis, they should not care whether WSIS is renewed as much as they should care about the government of their corporate headquarters.
Even that threat, however, is an easily mitigated one. For all its flaws and overreaching tendencies, the current U.S. Presidential administration has very little interest in and practically no enforceable power over the Internet registries. The IANA registries are not a physical asset that the U.S. can hold hostage, nor are they traders who can be taxed into submission. The registries are not U.S. government property that was illegally given away. Politically, a U.S. move to control IANA would have zero support within the global Internet community, and minimal support in the U.S. domestic polity. Control of the Internet registries is not what one would call political red meat for either Democrats or Republicans, but among those who actually know what the issue is, most support current arrangements. Legally, while ICANN is incorporated in a U.S. state, it can change that. The U.S. government cannot prevent the registries and their corporate parent from migrating out of the country, or even dissolving itself and reconstituting later as a corporation in a different jurisdiction. Besides, any serious attempt to assert control would require legislation and any such law would have a hard time getting through Congress. The Internet institutions have strong support and legitimacy within Congress and among the U.S. population. As a technical coordination system run by a private actor, the Internet registries can be mobile. The entire ICANN community – civil society actors, the Internet service providers, the tech platforms, the DNS industries, the at-large, the technical community and the government advisory committee – would all oppose the re-nationalization of ICANN and be in unanimous support of a move out of the United States jurisdiction should it happen.
A permanent IGF?
The themes of WSIS renewal, the future of “multistakeholderism,” the influence of IGF, and other process-related workshops dominated the sessions in Lillestrom. It would have been better had it been more forward-looking and focused on decoupling IGF and the UN. As its non-responses to the Ukraine invasion, Israel’s destruction of Gaza, and other recent events make clear, the UN is not up to the task of mediating great power rivalry in a multi-polar world. Annual global dialogues of stakeholders at the IGF are worthwhile and maintain the transnational ties needed to deal with the digital transformation, but no one believes that WSIS Forums or the Global Digital Compact are going to play a significant role in the evolution of global digital governance.
We predict that WSIS will be renewed, and that the IGF will continue to be joined at the hip with it. There is too much inertia pushing in that direction and not enough time for the critical questions to take root. Ideally, a renewed WSIS will be put on a short leash, perhaps another five years at most. That will give us enough time to plan for the needed phase shift. Without reform, renewal makes no sense. Without reform, both WSIS and IGF will wind down over the next five years, gradually losing relevance. The strongest argument against ending WSIS is the one cited by Janis Karklins in comment on our blog: The UN never ends anything.
Continuing the WSIS process simply perpetuates a shotgun marriage between multilateralism and “multi-stakeholderism” – a union which should be progressing toward gradual separation and an eventual divorce. Decoupling the two doesn’t mean they can’t continue to be friends. It doesn’t mean they won’t continue to intersect in various ways. It just means that global, private-sector based Internet governance institutions are independent of the UN system and do not need its recognition or approval.
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