UN Internet Governance Forum to Focus on Development

Meeting for the first time in Athens from 30 October to 2 November, the United Nations Internet Governance Forum will focus on "Internet Governance for Development." The theme was determined by the strong consensus reached at the World Summit on the Information Society and afterwards that the Internet should be a key for development, said Markus Kummer, Executive Director of the Forum's secretariat.

Topics to be addressed at the Forum include free flow of information and access to knowledge, threats to Internet security such as spam and "phishing," the "multilingualization" of the Internet, international domain names not in the English alphabet, and expanding access for users in poor countries.

There will be no negotiated outcome, but the Forum will seek to stimulate a dialogue between the private sector, civil society and the academic and technical communities and their institutions, who are running the Internet and have their tradition of informal bottom-up decision-making and networked communication; and the more formal and structured world of governments and intergovernmental organizations.

The Greek Prime Minister, Kostas Karamanlis, will speak at the opening on Monday, which will also be addressed by the two "fathers of the Internet," Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, co-inventors of the TCP/IP protocols.

The Greek Minister of Transport and Communications, Michalis Liapis, will chair the four-day meeting. Nitin Desai, the Chairman of the Forum's Advisory Group, will chair the session devoted to discussing the way forward. More than 30 workshops will be held in parallel to the main session.