‘Global Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration for Achieving a Safe, Secure and Tolerant CyberSpace: Enabling Growth and Sustainable Development through Cyber Ethics’

Main Hall at 09.30 – 12:00

TALKING in High Level Leaders Meeting (HLLM) on pre-event IGF, Indonesia Minister of Communication and Information Technology of the Republic of Indonesia, H.E. Tifatul Sembiring, stated that the purpose of the IGF are closely related to the acceleration of progress on Millenium Development Goals. ​‘Indonesia will propose that we as one global community develop more concrete global cyber-ethics’, the Minister said. ​‘These norms are to be common references for all stakeholders to conduct transactions and interactions in cyberspace,’ he said, adding that cyber ethics are fundamental to demonstrating respect for the values of different countries, communities, and cultures.

The ministers of United Kingdom, United States, Brazil, Japan, China, and Republic of Azerbaijan also have one voice that there should be an international collaboration to create an international law for cyberspace to protect countries’ asset, its citizens’ social live and cultures. They believed that as the internet users are growing, threats to a country’s security and sovereignty are growing as well. Therefore from the governments’ perspectives, to support world peace they should consider a more specific way and use a new standard for internet governance. Undersecretary General for the coordination of political and inter-organisational affairs in the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Mr. Thomas Gass said, ​‘The role of internet governance is important’. He also stated that the global collaboration could help to create a safe internet 2015 development agenda.

The civil society organizations representatives have similar concern about guaranteeing individual human rights and fundamental freedoms (such as freedom of expression) in our collective societal transition to life on the Internet. These rights have been said that this should not change when individuals go onto the internet. It has also been argued that access to knowledge and the right to speech one’s mind freely is essential for pursuing human, social, and economic development. It was said too that surely we need to watch for abuses of these right, that we must not be harming one another and that the rule of law must always be kept in mind and assured, but we also must build a level of trust and mutual understanding about using the Internet so that we can use it freely and openly to best harness its potential. As the President and CEO of ICANN, Mr. Fadi Chehade said, ​‘Public trust in Internet is important. We came to Bali to safe guard this public trust of the Internet’.

Policy makers and law enforcement agencies must ensure that these people enjoy the same freedoms online that they do offline. Of course this is a tremendous challenge as these rights certainly differ culturally at local, regional, and national levels. However, all stakeholders need to strengthen efforts to ensure the protection of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms in the online world. As the representatives of Project Director of Internet Democracy, Ms. Anja Kovaks added, ​‘We should emphasize mutual respect of human right. What we actually need is to protect human right first, then we can talk about cyber ethic’.

(The print version of this issue of IGF 2013 Daily News can be found here)