Bridging Perspectives at ICANN84: Multistakeholder Collaboration in the WSIS+20 Review
At ICANN84 in Dublin, which happened in the last week of October 2025, Global Partners Digital (GPD) and the Global Network Initiative (GNI) worked together to bridge perspectives across stakeholder communities. Through both closed-door and public sessions, we sought to deepen understanding of the WSIS+20 process, with the aim of facilitating discussions on areas of common concern between different stakeholder groups and building the foundations for coordinated advocacy in the months ahead.
Safeguarding multistakeholder internet governance
Building on over a year of GPD facilitating cross-stakeholder dialogue, including workshops at RightsCon 2025 and the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and coordinating joint outputs focused on the process, GPD partnered with GNI to organise an invitation-only workshop ”Safeguarding Multistakeholder Internet Governance: Building Alliances in WSIS+20”.
Participants explored four themes that cut across these communities; connectivity and access, data governance and AI, WSIS architecture, and human rights and the open Internet. A full summary of the workshop can be found here but, in short, there was strong convergence on the need to ground the review in existing initiatives, preserve WSIS’s inclusive multistakeholder structures, and reaffirm that human rights and an open, globally interoperable Internet remain at the heart of its vision.
This workshop was, in part, supported by the ICANN Grant Program through the Shaping the WSIS+20 Review for a Unified Internet Multistakeholderism (SWUIM) project.
Bridging perspectives: civil society and the technical community
To continue discussing common priorities with a broader group, GPD and GNI partnered with the ICANN Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group (NCSG) for a session Bridging Perspectives on WSIS+20 from the Technical Community and Civil Society, part of the ICANN84 official programme. The discussion underscored how closely intertwined issues of digital development, infrastructure integrity, and governance have become.
Farzaneh Badii (as a member of the ICANN Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group and founder of Digital Medusa) praised the efforts of the co-facilitators for the WSIS+20 process and UN agencies involved in the review in running a comprehensive consultation process and engaging stakeholders. She also highlighted that the Zero Draft is strong and incorporates input from civil society. However, she also flagged that advocacy around data localisation or infrastructure control during the negotiations could inadvertently undermine the interoperable Internet WSIS was designed to protect. In addition, she mentioned that language on human rights could be usefully broadened to extend to taking a human rights approach to standards development and implementation as well as laws to ensure a human rights-based approach to the governance of the internet and digital technologies; encompassing broader work by stakeholders involved in Internet Governance.
Anriette Esterhuysen (as a member of the Global Digital Rights Coalition for WSIS and the ICANN-funded SWIUM project) reminded participants that for many states and stakeholders from the global South WSIS is fundamentally a process about digital development, noting that digital inequality remains the unfulfilled promise of the original summit. She called for renewed focus on meaningful connectivity and on financing mechanisms that move beyond market-driven models, highlighting proposals for a taskforce to explore sustainable approaches to funding digital inclusion.
Ajith Francis (representing the Technical Community Coalition for Multistakeholderism (TCCM)) warned of increasing policy fragmentation and the erosion of technical interoperability. He argued that only a multistakeholder model can sustain the Internet as a federated network of networks, and that the IGF should be strengthened, both financially but also in its ability to play a role in agenda-setting. Ultimately, the IGF should bridge the divide between multilateral and multistakeholder governance.
During the discussion speakers emphasised common priorities; the need to preserve the IGF’s independence, resist efforts to narrow WSIS’s and the IGF’s scope to “Internet governance” alone, and the need to ensure that digital inclusion, connectivity, and human rights, and their connection to ICT4D, remain central to the review.
Looking ahead to intergovernmental negotiations
Throughout ICANN84, some commonalities emerged. Stakeholder communities share a deep commitment to protecting the multistakeholder governance model that has sustained the open and interoperable Internet for two decades, aligning on the importance of connectivity, access, and inclusion as the underpinning building blocks for subsequent elements of the WSIS framework, and underscoring the centrality of a human rights-based approach to the WSIS framework and action lines. The challenge now is to translate this alignment into coordinated advocacy which ensures that the WSIS+20 outcome document reaffirms human rights and multistakeholder internet governance as two of the foundational principles which will help to realise the WSIS+20 vision. In the coming weeks, the process will shift to primarily intergovernmental negotiations. As the opportunities for stakeholder engagement narrow, alignment and coordination will be more important than ever.
As the process continues, GPD will remain focused on facilitating these cross-community connections, helping to ensure that the WSIS vision of a people-centred, inclusive, and rights-based information society endures well beyond 2025.