The report of the “UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation” was published earlier this month, and contains both a set of considerations and a list of actionable items broken down into the following categories: “An Inclusive Digital Economy and Society”, “Human and Institutional Capacity”, “Human Rights and Human Agency”, “Trust, Security and Stability”, “Global Digital Cooperation”. The report contains a Declaration of Digital Interdependence, a document creating a key roadmap for future developments.
While the report discusses multistakeholder arrangements in an explicit manner, the UN Secretary-General in interviews and other communications has consistently used “inclusive multilateralism” to describe the structure going forward. In terms of practical implications to the UN Internet Governance ecosystem, three proposals were put forth by the high-level panel: A) Internet Governance Forum Plus, which creates other mechanisms similar to the Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG); B) Distributed Co-Governance Architecture, which mimics the manner in which processes are already carried out in institutions such as ICANN; C) Digital Commons Architecture, which divides Internet governance themes into tracks and proposes each be owned by an institution.
For the full text of the report, visit: https://www.un.org/en/digital-cooperation-panel/