IAB statement on the NETmundial Initiative
statement-iab-statement-on-the-netmundial-initiative-00

The IAB thinks it is valuable to develop tools to support communities that can share solutions, expertise, and research related to Internet Governance. We welcomed the initial NETmundial meeting as an additional way to foster the development of a broadly based community engaged in supporting the Internet’s distributed systems and methods. We believe that the recent NETmundial Initiative (https://www.netmundial.org/press-release-1) to develop a long-running dialogue on these topics, in the form of a web site and collection of materials, may be a valuable addition to the overall community efforts.

We are concerned, however, that the creation of a highly structured coordination council for the Initiative may impede the development of broad participation, and so may be premature. Because the coordination council members appear to be the responsible parties for the effort, the effort may not foster the sort of community engagement that we believe is fundamental to the Internet’s distributed nature and the NETmundial principles (https://www.netmundial.org/principles).

To make the Internet work, many people with unique perspectives of the Internet and from different communities must cooperate. We believe a broadly based dialogue among all these communities is necessary, and support any effort to enable this dialogue. The permissionless innovation given as the goal of this effort is better served by first enabling technical infrastructure to further that cooperation; that might require some lightweight administration driven by community consensus. No coordination council is needed now, and therefore the IAB will not participate in the council at this time.