Conclusion: Good governance in the region

Sometime during summer 2005, WGIG will issue its report. The working group will have been together for a little over seven months, a short time in which to address such a wide range of complex and often rapidly changing issues. We should not expect the report to be full of specific problem-solving recommendations. It will be the start of a process rather than the end.

Clearly, work must begin to counter the most pressing problems, including launching concrete efforts to build technical and policy capacity, tackling spam, and addressing the fundamental problems of the DNS regarding the unilateral control and uncertain future of the root servers and regarding multilingualism. These are issues that are very relevant to the Asia-Pacific region, and we need to begin a regional multi-sectoral dialogue extending beyond the lifetime of WGIG to discuss how they can be addressed.

In Asia Pacific, where governments and inter-governmental organisations tend to dominate the policy-making arena, we should ensure that ICT policy dialogues include all sectors. In particular, the role of civil society, which is often the missing player in these discussions, needs to be strengthened. The Geneva summit recommended that institutional arrangements for the governance of the Internet and the drafting of ICT policy should be multilateral, transparent, democratic, and open to all stakeholders. These principles for good Internet governance should be embraced in our region.