IGF 2007

Date:	12–15 November, 2007
Location:	Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Venue:	Windsor Barra Hotel
Web:	Event Page

IGF 2007, the second meeting of the IGF, was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Context

According to the CGI.br website, in an article previous from the event, more than a thousand representatives from government, the private sector, civil society, as well as academic and technological communities wre expected for the second Internet Governance Forum (IGF), which was hosted by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br). The focus was to produce interactive discussions on a wide range of issues related to Internet governance. Among the topics to be addressed were freedom of expression, cybercrime, security, privacy, transparency in rules, access costs, multilingualism and diversity, measures to combat child pornography, and protection against the exploitation of children.

Theme

The overall theme for the meeting was: "Internet Governance for Development", and the agenda was structured along the following broad themes:

• Critical Internet resources: infrastructure and management of key resources such as the domain name system and protocol for Internet addresses;
• Access: Internet connectivity: Policies and Costs;
• Diversity: promotion of linguistic diversity and local content;
• Openness: freedom of expression, free flow of information, authorization and access to knowledge;
• Security: building trust and assurance through collaboration.

Discussion

The first "IGF Book" is about the two first IGF meetings (IGF 2006 and IGF 2007), and so it talks about the discussions that occured in a single take. These have been mainly about issues of equity and freedom. The broad theme of equity covers many things - the concern about Internet users in developing countries, about users in remote areas, about gender, about indigenous people, about people with disability. This concern for equity also underlies the discussions on diversity, local content and IDN so that the Internet is more accessible to people whose natural language is not English, natural script is not Latin. A very important dimension of equity is the question of access cost which has come up again and again in the discussions. The IGF discussions have also focused on the tremendous growth in Internet usage -in fact, the issue of Internet governance has acquired salience precisely because of this explosive growth. But the concern for equity also manifested itself in the frequent references in the discussions to the five billion who are not yet on the Internet.

Outcomes

According to the "Message from the Hosts of the 2007 IGF Meeting" present in the first "IGF Book" and written by Hadil da Rocha Vianna, Director for Scientific and Technological Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the time, the Rio event advanced along the path that began in Athens, in terms of substance, by dedicating a main session to an evaluation of the existing mechanisms for the administration of critical Internet resources (addressing, protocols, infrastructure) vis-à-vis the principles and guidelines established by the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). This new main session – the best attended in Rio –emphasized the public policy aspects and cross-cutting nature of critical resources management and its impact on issues such as access, diversity, openness and security.