NETmundial Initiative Goes Live, Global Internet Community Invited to Participate

SAO PAULO, Nov. 6, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Six months after the historic NETmundial meeting in Sao Paulo, the global Internet community is invited to participate in the multistakeholder NETmundial Initiative, a platform to energize bottom-up, collaborative solutions for a distributed Internet governance ecosystem.

Enabled by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), in partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Initiative will promote greater coordination and cooperation among stakeholders, propelling the Internet as a shared, neutral, and global resource for human solidarity and economic progress.

The global Internet community is invited to continue improving the existing Internet governance framework ensuring the full involvement of all stakeholders in their respective roles and responsibilities based on the Principles and Roadmap developed in Sao Paulo. Efforts to identify collaborative solutions fit for 21st century challenges will be supported and enabled by an online platform housed on www.netmundial.org.

"This marks the beginning of efforts to carry forward the cooperative spirit of Sao Paulo to solve issues in tangible ways. The Initiative will put on display the essence of multistakeholderism, recognizing it as a key mechanism for advancing global Internet policymaking and governance," said Virgilio Augusto Fernandes Almeida, Brazil's Secretary for Information Technology Policies and member of CGI.

The NETmundial Initiative will use crowdsourcing mechanisms to coalesce stakeholders and enable permission-less innovation to build and deliver distributed Internet governance enablers and solutions. The focus is to facilitate global cooperation so that solutions for distributed Internet governance can be broadly diffused and embraced through loosely coupled and coordinative approaches. Solutions built in the Initiative may be adopted by organizations or nations at will.

"Dialogue is and will remain essential. However, the global community is now ready for action. The NETmundial Initiative channels the global community's energies to deliver practical Internet governance enablers and solutions to address immediate needs—especially for the growing number of policy issues regarding the use of the Internet in the global space," explained Fadi Chehade, ICANN's President and CEO. "For example, a solution mapping mechanism is urgently needed to help stakeholders—especially in developing countries—find their way through a distributed Internet governance ecosystem, while polycentric solution formulation will help address the growing number of issues ranging from cyber-security to user privacy."

The activities of the NETmundial Initiative do not intend to replace but rather to complement the efforts undertaken by the IGF and other fora and organizations. The Initiative focuses resources to formulate solutions for the issues identified through those multistakeholder dialogues.

Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum underscored the importance of advancing Internet governance for the global community, noting that "there is a need for deeper international cooperation for the Internet to achieve its full potential as an enabler of economic growth and human potential. The NETmundial Initiative platform will be a global public good. It will be a place where Internet governance expertise, ideas and resources can be shared on a more efficient, self-organizing basis for the benefit of all."

The Initiative will have a diverse multistakeholder Coordination Council that will be formed through a bottom-up process following an approach similar to the one adopted for the NETmundial Meeting in Sao Paulo in order to ensure that all the activities of the NETmundial Initiative are carried out in the spirit of the NETmundial Principles. The Coordination Council's inaugural public meeting will take place in January 2015.

The NETmundial Initiative invites Coordination Council nominations until 6 December 2014. With community support, the Coordination Council should be in operation as early as possible in 2015 to start building practical solutions for the global community in 2015. The Initiative also invites submissions of initial proposals and ideas anchored in the NETmundial Sao Paulo roadmap developed in community consensus.

The NETmundial Initiative remains an iterative process and can only evolve through the broad-based involvement of stakeholders from across the world. All interested individuals are encouraged to provide comments and ideas to advance the principles and roadmap developed by global community at NETmundial in Sao Paulo. For more information, visit www.netmundial.org.

ABOUT CGI.BR
The Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) was created by Interministerial Ordinance 147, of May 31st, 1995, which was amended by Presidential Decree 4,829 of September 3rd, 2003, with the purpose of coordinating and integrating all Internet service initiatives in Brazil, as well as promoting technical quality, innovation and the dissemination of the services available. The CGI.br is comprised of members from the government, the corporate sector, the third sector and the academic community, and as such constitutes a unique Internet governance model for the effective participation of society in decisions involving network implementation, management and use. Based on the principles of multilateralism, transparency and democracy, since July 2004 the CGI.br has been democratically electing representatives from the civil society to participate in discussions and to debate priorities for the Internet together with the government.

ABOUT ICANN
ICANN's mission is to ensure a stable, secure and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet you have to type an address into your computer - a name or a number. That address has to be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN coordinates these unique identifiers across the world. Without that coordination we wouldn't have one global Internet. ICANN was formed in 1998. It is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet's unique identifiers. ICANN doesn't control content on the Internet. It cannot stop spam and it doesn't deal with access to the Internet. But through its coordination role of the Internet's naming system, it does have an important impact on the expansion and evolution of the Internet. For more information please visit: www.icann.org.

ABOUT WEF
The World Economic Forum is an international institution committed to improving the state of the world through public-private cooperation in the spirit of global citizenship. It engages with business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.

Incorporated as a not-for-profit foundation in 1971 and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the Forum is independent, impartial and not tied to any interests. It cooperates closely with all leading international organizations (www.weforum.org).

For inquires, please contact [email protected].

SOURCE NETmundial Initiative