(MENAFN- Kuwait News Agency (KUNA)) The World Economic Forum on Saturday launched a multi-year 'Future of the Internet Initiative' in an effort to help strengthen trust and expand concrete cooperation on internet-related challenges and opportunities.
The informal process of strategic dialogue and cooperation will seek to complement formal institutions and existing initiatives. It will do so by leveraging the Forum's unique inter-ministerial and cross-industry communities, as well as its interdisciplinary intellectual networks and capacity to catalyse multistakeholder partnerships.
"The internet is a shared, global resource that for over 25 years has served as a key tool for social, political and economic development. It is vital that we safeguard this shared global resource by finding ways of debating and together addressing the challenges it faces," said Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum.
"Striking the right balance on all these issues will require mutual understanding and trust among interested parties and stakeholders. We hope to help achieve this through additional direct dialogue, supported wherever possible by careful analysis, and invite our partners, members and constituents to engage actively in this process," said Richard Samans, Managing Director and Member of the Managing Board, World Economic Forum.
The purpose of the initiative is to help develop the internet as a core engine of human progress and safeguard its globally integrated, highly distributed and multistakeholder nature.
It comes at a time when policy-makers, who are struggling to keep pace with many related policy and governance questions, and governments seek to address legitimate policy concerns related to the increasingly diverse array of services and other activities available on the web.
The initiative will initially focus on the following five broad areas, potentially exploring such questions as policy and societal challenges, including international cooperation, privacy, cybercrime, access for all amd impact on business models.
The future of the internet is one of 10 global challenges identified by the World Economic Forum for which accelerated progress is widely perceived to be contingent on new or expanded public-private cooperation.
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