The future of the internet is the central topic of the 11th Internet Governance Forum Germany, which is taking place today at the Federal Economic Affairs Ministry. Some 200 guests from business, government, civil society and the technical community are expected to attend the event. The conference will address a wide range of topics, such as ensuring security in 5G networks, developing efficient approaches for dealing with platform giants, boosting artificial intelligence, combating hate speech and discussing the potential benefits that the digital transformation will bring to sustainable development.

Federal Minister Peter Altmaier said: "The IGF is a forum which fosters broad participation and productive interaction between different stakeholders. We need this openness in particular in order to maintain the internet as a truly global infrastructure. It is particularly important to me that we closely involve small and medium-sized enterprises in internet governance issues. This is because digitalisation and forward-looking technologies such as AI are increasingly becoming the key to economic success. Our aim is to ensure that the issues discussed at the IGF will be translated into specific policies and measures."

The German IGF is Germany’s national initiative of the global IGF. The latter was founded by the United Nations in 2006 and since then it has served as a central discussion platform for all stakeholders involved with the internet. The UN IGF meets once a year and in 2019 Germany will host the Forum for the first time. The Federal Economic Affairs Ministry is inviting internet governance stakeholders from all over the world to attend the conference entitled “One World, One Net. One Vision”, which is to be held in Berlin from 25 to 29 November.

The IGF is taking a multi-stakeholder approach that enables all participants to feed in their views, concerns, experiences and challenges. Important topics addressed by the UN IGF are data governance, digital inclusion and security. The key goal in this context is to maintain the internet as an open and global space as we all know it.