Context: Why is this project important?

Internet policies, standards, rules, and guidelines are established globally by a wide range of institutions. Naturally, these policies, standards, rules, and guidelines reflect the priorities and interests of the institutions and countries that shape them. Many countries in Asia and the Pacific have started to reap the benefits of Internet technology. However, most countries of the Asia Pacific region lack the opportunity to participate in global Internet policy-making and governance, often due to lack of resources and local capacities. These countries are missing out on opportunities to participate in Internet Governance, thus ceding control of global Internet policies to other, more powerful countries.

The Project: How does this initiative address the development problem?

With the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS II) coming up in November 2005, this project, “Internet Governance Scoping Study,” aims to establish a forum for dialogue with stakeholders in the Asia-Pacific region in order to generate a regional perspective on Internet Governance. The UN Secretary General has formed a Working Group on International Governance (UN-WGIG), to which this project will contribute. UN-WGIG’s mandate is to: define Internet Governance; identify public policy issues; chart out roles and responsibilities of various stakeholders; and report the result of these activities to WSIS II. The project is being implemented in two phases. Phase I focuses on open regional dialogue on Internet Governance, as well as awareness raising. Based on the results of the feedback received via country surveys and consultations conducted during the initial phase, Phase II focuses on capacity building and policy implementation. It is intended that this project will enable countries in Asia and the Pacific to participate more actively in international dialogues on Internet Governance such as WSIS.

Objectives:

To increase stakeholder awareness on the issues of Internet Governance within the Asia-Pacific region. More specifically, the project aims to:

• Build a multi-stakeholder approach to facilitate an open regional dialogue on Internet Governance
• Contribute to the meaningful definition of “Internet Governance”
• Identify important Internet Governance issues of today
• Provide the Asia-Pacific input on Internet Governance public policy from a regional perspective to UN-WGIG and WSIS
• Raise awareness for policy-makers, civil society and private sector players from the Asia-Pacific region on various dimensions of Internet Governance
• Research, collate, document and distribute relevant materials on Internet Governance through a dedicated website and facilitate active input from stakeholders via a dedicated online discussion forum

Development Impact

As the project has just recently started, its development impact cannot be assessed at this time.

Outputs