In Break From Past Leadership Role, US Gov Largely Missing From Internet Governance Forum

The United States has been a steadfast supporter of the UN-led Internet Governance Forum since its inception over a decade ago, regularly bringing large and high-level delegations to the Forum. The US must have seen the forum as the lesser evil when governments from many continents pounded the desks during the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) conference in Tunis over the US special role in overseeing the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and thereby the heart of the domain name system, the root zone. But IGF 2017, held this week, saw a dramatic change in that regard.

The official US delegation included a mere half-dozen members, a dwarf compared to the official delegation of the small Netherlands, for instance, which sent 40 people (10 from ministries). No high-level speeches, no press conferences, no intention to become the largest funder, which the US was during Phase 2 of the IGF (2011-2016) with an amount of $700.000. Perhaps this is no wonder, given the announcement this week after the UN resolution on Jerusalem. There, the US said it would remember the UN vote against the US embassy being moved to Jerusalem when payment for the UN is due.

And with the cyber coordinator position of the US State Department eliminated as part of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s “redesign”, another cyber czar stepped into the spotlight:

“This year we sent a big delegation to the conference and think tanks, academia, ICT companies and civil societies have sent their representatives to the conference and organised quite a number of events during the meeting which is very much encouraging and certainly we support the further strengthening of the process,” said Long Zhong, coordinator for cyber affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, China.

Long recommended a “further strengthening the role of the IGF” and to “make it a more constructive and substantial platform for promoting cyber space governance.” The UN should play an important role, he said, while explaining what he thought should be tackled: The “weaponization in cyberspace”, “cyber-attacks” and “issues like cyber-crime, trans-border cyber-crime, and cyber-terrorism.”

 

 

Image Credits: United Nations