On 29 July 2025, the UN organized a WSIS+20 Informal Stakeholder Consultation at which a number of government and stakeholder representations made three-minute statements. This was in response to the Elements Paper circulated by the WSIS+20 Review’s Co-facilitators, an important initial step en route to the zero draft of the text that will be the basis of negotiations and consultations over the next months in advance of the formal WSIS Review in the UN General Assembly in December. The materials, including a recording of the session and written submissions from speakers, can be found here.

My brief intervention has elicited some private debate among friends and colleagues who are fellow veterans of the WSIS negotiations twenty years ago. As such, I thought maybe I would share it with a wider range of people in order to see whether what to me seems a simple and obvious suggestion is actually such a terrible or unworkable idea. I look forward to any constructive engagement.

Thank you to the co-facilitators for this opportunity to speak. It is really great to see some government representatives here alongside the stakeholders. It would be even better if we had the opportunity to actually interact with each other as we did throughout the WSIS preparatory process 20 years ago. I’m sure all of us who were involved then have memories of useful dialogues between government and stakeholder representatives that helped to clarify key issues like how the Internet worked and how its governance did and did not work, and so on, and these fostered some important convergence in thinking. Anything that can be done to approximate that level of interactivity in the time that remains in this Review would be really helpful.

I’d like to speak to the language on enhanced cooperation and Internet governance and express a concern about the potential risks of this language in the particular context of today’s hyper-polarized geopolitical environment and UN budgetary challenges.

In Tunis, the purposefully ambiguous language on enhanced cooperation helped various parties to declare victory and go home, so it seemed like a clever solution. Unfortunately, in subsequent years we never managed to reach any consensus on a definition of what enhanced cooperation actually means. This is a sharp contrast to what we did in the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG), where we put forward a definition of Internet governance that addressed the “who, what and how” of Internet governance. This was taken on board by the WSIS and helped to tone down the debate about Internet governance in some respects, and the definition has been invoked as standing agreed language in UN processes ever since.

Absent a shared understanding of the “who, what and how,” enhanced cooperation has become a lightning rod for deep geopolitical differences that have stretched across UN GA processes, the WSIS+10 Review, and the two failed Working Groups on Enhanced Cooperation organized under the CSTD.

Three different kinds of understandings have been particularly prominent in consequence.

First, there are those who think it’s a multi-stakeholder initiative to which all actors and institutions are contributing. Second, there are those who say No, it’s a purely intergovernmental process to enable governments to participate on an equal footing in existing organizations and processes. And then there’s a third view that says the language is actually somehow a mandate to create a new intergovernmental organization that have broad authority over the Internet, the impossibility of achieving consensus on this notwithstanding.

Given this divisive history, foregrounding enhanced cooperation again in the current geopolitical context could lead to even greater division and deadlock than it did in the past, and it could even give some parties grounds to disown the WSIS process more generally. Anything that can be portrayed as a mandate to debate creating a new intergovernmental organization or binding agreement on Internet governance could be even more unacceptable to some countries and parties than it was in the past.

A simple solution to avoid such difficulties would be for the governments that are advocating enhanced cooperation to make clear that a new intergovernmental organization is not what they have in mind. We’re not in Tunis anymore, and ambiguity on this issue is no longer strategic. Hence, let’s all just say what we actually mean by enhanced cooperation, and what it is we want a mandate to do. After all, there’s been evolution in the positions of some key governments since we had the last debates on the topic, so it’s possible that we could avoid some serious conflicts that would debilitate the whole process by simply being clear about what “the ask” is here.

My suggestion is to try to avoid a breakdown in cooperation and actors talking about walking away because they think that something problematic is being attempted. Let’s just be clear about what we are advocating, and if it is simply to help developing country voices become louder and more impactful in existing institutions and process, great—let’s say that, and what exactly this means, and then move on toward a successful outcome in December. Such clarifications would also aid any further work on enhanced cooperation that may be undertaken in the CSTD going forward.

Thank you.