In the same year that World Wide Web celebrates 25 years, Brazil hosts NETmundial – Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance. The meeting is organized in a partnership between the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) and /1Net, a forum that gathers international entities of the various stakeholders involved with Internet governance. The Internet Democracy Project is participating in the event.

This meeting will focus on the elaboration of principles of Internet governance and the proposal for a roadmap for future development of this ecosystem. The goal is to consolidate proposals based on these two topics. NETmundial represents the beginning of a process for the construction of such policies in the global context, following a model of participatory plurality.

With the goal of bringing together representatives of civil society, private sector, academia and technical community to establish strategic guidelines related to the use and development of the Internet in the world, NETmundial was concept into committees format, each one with representatives of the involved stakeholders, distinguished experts, aiming to give guidelines and organize the meeting.

NETmundial is supported by the High-Level Multistakeholder Committee, composed of ministerial representatives of 12 countries (Argentina, Brazil, France, Ghana, Germany, India, Indonesia, South Africa, South Korea, Tunisia, Turkey and United States of America) plus 12 members of the multistakeholder international community. This Committee includes representatives of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) of the United Nations, and representation of the European Commission. Its responsibility is to oversee the overall strategy of the event and to promote the involvement of the international community around the themes that will be discussed at the meeting.

The Executive Multistakeholder Committee is responsible for the agenda of the meeting, its format, the call for participants and the management of the received content contributions, ensuring balanced participation of the global community. This Committee has nine international members, including representatives of technical, civil and academic communities, the private sector and the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations. The Logistics and Organizational Committee and the Council of Governmental Advisors complete the Organization of the event.

During the phase of content contribution submissions, the meeting has received 188 contributions, from 46 different countries. The proposal is to embrace all stakeholders requests in the new model of Internet governance that should have its development started at the meeting. NETmundial happens on April 23rd and 24th, 2014, in São Paulo, Brazil, and will be broadcast live, as well as allow remote forms of participation, which will be announced shortly.

Follow #netmundial2014 on Twitter for updates.


The Internet Democracy Project has collaborated with other civil society organisations through the Best Bits platform to make two submissions to the meeting:

The full text of both submissions can also be found on our website (see below).