Twenty Years On: What WSIS+20 Means For International Digital Governance

The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) concluded its twenty-year review on December 17, closing WSIS+20, a process revisiting one of the United Nations’ most influential experiments in digital governance.

Historically, WSIS is significant because it marked the first time governments, international organizations, the private sector and civil society came together to address the social and governance implications of the Internet. When the original summits took place in Geneva (2003) and Tunis (2005), there was no settled concept of “Internet governance” as a policy field, and no overarching framework for digital cooperation. WSIS helped to create both.

The outcomes of the two original summits, held in 2003-2005, established the foundations of today’s digital governance landscape. The Geneva Plan of Action set out a series of technologically neutral Action Lines or digital development goals, with implementation distributed across multiple UN agencies and system-wide follow-up overseen by the Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD). The Tunis Agenda turned more directly to governance, endorsing a distributed, multistakeholder approach to managing critical Internet resources and creating the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), which remains the central global space for multistakeholder dialogue on digital policy. Periodic reviews, negotiated by the UN General Assembly, assess progress and renew mandates, including the mandate of the IGF.

WSIS+20 matters because it tested whether this multistakeholder model, designed in a very different technological and geopolitical era, could still provide a coherent and legitimate foundation for global digital governance today. Now that the review process has concluded, it’s time to consider whether it has achieved its aims or whether, given the context, that would always be difficult.

The digital world, twenty years later

The review process took place amidst deep global fracture, with many governments and non-governmental actors seeking to advance widely differing views on the values, norms and structures that should guide digital governance.

It also arrived at a moment of broader rupture: the UN’s relevance in digital policymaking and its ability to deliver change is under question, driven by the increasing centrality of technology to all of our lives, the tremendous economic and epistemic power of a small number of big tech companies, and a drift towards minilateral diplomacy. The global order that produced the original WSIS agreements and their reaffirmation ten years ago has also been somewhat overturned, with the US withdrawing further from the multilateral system and reneging on agreements on human rights promotion, sustainable development, gender equality, and environmental protection. At the same time, a global rebalancing of power means the group of 77 developing countries now makes up two-thirds of the General Assembly’s membership.

Twenty years ago, the centrality of the internet and digital technologies to many societies would have been unimaginable. The past two decades have seen a remarkable growth in internet users and digital innovation. However, deep divisions remain. The WSIS process has always, principally, been about digital development. One figure that brings today’s digital inequality into sharp relief is the estimated 2.2 billion people who remain unconnected. A core task of the review was to consider the actions needed to address this persistent infrastructure gap, as well as the downstream inequalities that impact people’s ability to make use of the internet in a way that qualitatively benefits them.

Another key part of the WSIS’s legacy and its future relevance concerns Internet governance. The WSIS brought the multistakeholder approach to governance of the Internet, which originated in technical standards-setting bodies, into the multilateral realm. There was an expectation amongst principally global north governments and non-governmental actors that the WSIS would maintain this approach.

What has WSIS+20 achieved?

Given this difficult context, what has the WSIS+20 review process actually achieved? Before discussing the key policy areas under discussion, it’s worth considering what, as a process, it fundamentally does and doesn’t do.

It will help to set the agenda for the UN’s work on digital development. There is a huge amount of work happening across the UN focused on both the governance and use of digital technologies. The outcome will help to guide how different UN agencies work together to achieve the central aim of an inclusive, people-centric digital environment. It makes progress by refining and developing the way that UN agencies tasked with delivering and measuring WSIS outcomes work. It requests that they develop targets, metrics and implementation roadmaps, and two additional UN agencies - the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UN OHCHR) and UN Women - have been given an anchoring role to mainstream human rights and embed gender considerations. Surprisingly, such a roadmap did not exist before.

The outcome document also serves as a shared reference point, creating a non-binding but visible commitment from governments. While it is not necessarily designed to shape national legislation, it provides the international community with concrete text to point to when governments diverge from the commitments they agreed to during the process. However, even as the final document was adopted, several states, including the United States, Russia, and Iran disassociated themselves from parts of the text, raising questions about its value as a tool for accountability. Since then, the US withdrew from 66 international organisations, including the UN Economic and Social Council (UN ECOSOC) and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA)–each responsible for assessing and reviewing progress toward the WSIS goals and administering the IGF. Exactly what this means for the US’s commitment to the WSIS+20 outcomes is unclear at this point but it is likely to have implications for funding and implementation.

Assessing the outcomes: internet governance, financing, and the IGF

Internet governance was a primary focus for many states, particularly from the Global Minority, and the WSIS+20 review was framed as an existential threat to the existing approach. In this respect, the outcome can be read as a defensive success. WSIS largely reaffirms the existing multistakeholder approach to internet governance, resisting efforts to centralise authority into purely intergovernmental structures.

Beyond this, however, the process made little substantive progress on internet governance. The text says little about the extent to which the Internet has become more fragmented, mediated, and uneven in the past two decades, or how far this diverges from the original WSIS vision of an open, global, and interoperable network. A commitment to avoiding Internet fragmentation is effectively carried over from the Global Digital Compact, without being significantly strengthened or operationalised. In addition, the discussion on what drove this change was limited. Questions about platform dominance, differentiated access, enclosure, and the erosion of a shared public digital space remain largely implicit. For many civil society actors, members of the technical community, and stakeholders from the Global Majority, this is a missed opportunity. Perhaps this was inevitable; negotiating states include countries driving internet fragmentation and which benefit from the economic power of the companies contributing to it.

One area where this debate unfolded was the discussion on financing. There was an expectation that the review would address how forces such as monopolisation and market-driven models have failed to deliver the achievement of universal connectivity and meaningful access and consider how financing could offer alternatives. The outcome left many dissatisfied, especially the G77. The result–an internal task force, tasked with assessing financing gaps and recommending actions–is viewed by many as failing to address the persistent investment deficit in parts of the Global Majority. This is a missed opportunity in an area the WSIS was expected to deliver on.

On the other hand, by establishing the IGF as a permanent entity within the UN system, this WSIS review has lived up to the expectations of the community, guaranteeing the ongoing existence of one of the more genuinely multistakeholder fora. The value of the IGF cannot be diminished. While there are concerns about what the outcome implies, how far these manifest as a real threat will be borne out through implementation.

The future of digital discussions at the UN

Ultimately, the relevance of the WSIS+20 will be judged on the extent to which it delivers on the expectations of the community that helped to shape it. The high level of engagement from the digital policy community, the willingness of diplomats to consider their input, and a final consensus outcome document which has already begun to receive positive appraisals, indicate a high level of goodwill and interest in making the process work. Amidst political turmoil and an unpredictable world order, it shows that the UN still has a role in addressing the fundamentally global issue of how to govern technology.

However, it also pointed to an unpredictable future for multilateral digital policy discussions. Throughout the process, there was tension between Western European countries negotiating defensively, and the G77 pushing for more fundamental reform. The divergence of viewpoints in this substantial block made it difficult for them to achieve cut-through on their policy objectives. One of the most notable features was how often the United States and Russia objected to similar paragraphs of the text. While consensus was achieved, and that certainly speaks to the willingness of the negotiating parties to compromise, it doesn’t necessarily suggest that States’ positions have grown closer.

A modest success at a turbulent time

Whether the WSIS will help to make the digital world more inclusive by addressing persistent inequalities remains unresolved. The lack of concrete financing measures, the drift towards siloed governance, and the lack of discussion on market concentration point to challenges ahead. These factors contribute to countries’ unequal ability to influence governance discussions and access the benefits of digitalisation and the outcome largely leaves them unaddressed.

Yet, judged against narrower expectations produces a more positive assessment. WSIS+20 made genuine progress in improving its implementation structure. Despite shortcomings, it received broad praise for integrating principles of multistakeholder engagement within a multilateral process. It achieved a permanent mandate for the IGF with a clear call for financing and recognition of its wider ecosystem. Viewed against these more modest ambitions, it can be seen as a win which has shored up confidence in the capacity of the UN system to deliver incremental gains.

A valid question is whether the review process could ever be expected to offer something more fundamental. The agreed resolution is an aspirational, universal agreement, negotiated by some of the governments that contribute to or profit from the political and economic forces that shape and perpetuate digital injustice. It lacks the teeth to deal with issues of market concentration or avert trends of state control or corporate capture. At best, it can aspire to have a persuasive effect on the most powerful actors in the digital ecosystem. What it provides instead is a baseline and a living process: one that the wider community can continue to shape.