#IDDTalks: Role and perspectives of Internet Governance

Thursday, 11th November 2021. The Internet governance debate is more pressing than ever, however the current spaces for collaboration and cooperation are in question. In this context, Andrés Sastre and Andrés Piazza (IDD LAC) conducted a talk that had as a guest Vice President of External Engagement at the Internet Society, Sebastián Bellagamba, as a guest. They addressed various topics around Internet Governance: its role, its weaknesses and its virtues, what new direction it must take to have a real impact on government agendas and people’s lives.

“Today we have two major processes that converge to a certain extent,” explains Sebastián Bellagamba during the first part of his presentation. On the one hand we have the large corporations that have taken all the preeminent on the Internet, or rather, on some layer of the Internet. On the other hand, the need for regulation that often comes hand in hand with good intentions but is misguided, and many times is directly guided by bad intentionsThe great challenge is how to make the internet preserve the characteristics that made it possible for us to continue working and studying during a pandemic that forced us to be locked up at home for a long time, that transformative and developmental value for our societies, and, at the same time that we deal with with those negative side effects, without losing the goose that lays the golden eggs along the way. That is, for Sebastián, the great issue that we have to solve.

Look at everything he said, in this extensive but very revealing and necessary talk, for the moment in which the region lives, in which we must make urgent decisions and accelerate the Digital Ecosystem development.