Q2/2020 - EuroDIG

The 13th European Internet Governance Forum (EuroDIG) was held in form of a virtual meeting from 10 to 12 June 2020. Nearly all plenary sessions and workshops could take place as originally planned^[1]. 

The discussion was managed by three studios in Trieste, The Hague and Berlin and coordinated by the EuroDIG head quarter in Leipzig. The virtual meeting made obvious the great potential an online conference offers. The participants could easily switch from one virtual conference room to another and attend parallel workshops. Extensively used chat options that ran parallel to the presentations and discussions of the appointed speakers created an added value that can at best be reached by the conversations in the breaks at offline events. In total, 1,200 attendants had registered for the conference. The number of participants to the individual workshops ranged from 30 to 300.

Regarding contents, the discussion was grouped into 4 categories that comprised topics like Internet legislation, norms and standards, 5G, cyber security, fake news & hate speech, data governance, access to the Internet as well as climate, sustainability and digitisation. UN Assistant Secretary-General Fabrizio Hochschild used the EuroDIG to present the UN Roadmap for Digital Cooperation of UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Besides the moderator there was a rapporteur in each session, who summarised the key findings of the discussion in two or three “messages” at the end. The messages will be made available for further discussion until the end of July 2020 and be forwarded to the global IGF of the UN^[2].  

Pearse O'Donohue, Director for Future Networks in the European Commission, acknowledged the EuroDIG as a perfect platform for discussing Europe’s future role in the global Internet governance debate^[3]. Provided the travel restrictions imposed due to the coronavirus pandemic will be lifted, Trieste is ready to host a face-to-face EuroDIG14 in 2021.