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The long-awaited Elements Paper for the 20-year review of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) has finally been released—and, regrettably, it underdelivers. In UN parlance, an “elements paper” outlines the key ideas and proposals that form the backbone of a future declaration or outcome document. It is, in other words, the skeleton on which the final body of work is built. So its content matters.
This year’s WSIS+20 review unfolds in a world starkly different from the one that hosted the last review a decade ago. The geopolitical landscape has shifted dramatically. Ideological divides have widened. The Internet itself has evolved—both technologically and politically—in ways that few could have predicted twenty years ago. Against this backdrop, the WSIS process is caught between legacy aspirations and new global fractures. The core question is whether a vision crafted two decades ago can still guide the next twenty years of global digital governance. The Good To its credit, the Elements Paper reaffirms the original WSIS vision of building a “people-centered, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society.” This people-first emphasis is not just symbolic—it is politically meaningful. Today, many initiatives on digital governance, including the UN’s Global Digital Compact (GDC), have leaned heavily into state-centric approaches. By contrast, WSIS has historically been broader in its focus—rooted in development, access, and equity. That framing still matters. Encouragingly, the paper also acknowledges persistent digital divides and the structural inequities that prevent entire populations from meaningfully participating in the digital economy. It recognizes the need to close these gaps and positions WSIS+20 as an opportunity to do so in coordination with the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. Another welcome inclusion is the explicit recognition that a global, open, and interoperable Internet is essential for achieving these goals. The paper rightly calls for collaboration “to prevent, identify and address risks of fragmentation of the Internet.” Still, the tone here is oddly subdued. Fragmentation is no longer a hypothetical threat—it is an ongoing reality with tangible impacts on people, businesses, and national economies. The final resolution will need to address this issue with far more urgency and clarity, especially as governments continue to drift apart on core principles like interoperability, trust, and openness. The Bad The most troubling aspect of the Elements Paper is how much it echoes the Global Digital Compact—a document many warned would end up overshadowing WSIS. That fear appears to have been justified. The sections around key issues like human rights, data governance, and artificial intelligence is majorly lifted from the GDC. Even its discussion of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF)—a central legacy of the WSIS process—borrows wholesale from the GDC: “The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has become an established forum for discussion…”. This is more than lazy drafting; it suggests an inversion of influence. Rather than guiding the GDC, WSIS is being subsumed by it. Nowhere is this more evident than in the paper’s treatment of human rights. The document gives lip service to rights protections but ultimately weakens their prominence by leaning on language that accommodates governments—like China and Russia—that routinely invoke “national security” to suppress online freedoms. Paragraph 48 states: “International rights agreements permit restrictions on expression…provided that these are relevant, proportionate and established in law.” While technically accurate, this framing creates space for state overreach. Even more concerning is what’s missing: there’s no reference to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, nor any mention of the central role played by the UN Human Rights Council in digital governance. For a process rooted in rights-based development, this is a glaring omission. Furthermore, while the Elements Paper nods to the idea of aligning WSIS+20 and the GDC, it fails to explain what such alignment would look like in practice. WSIS has endured because of its agility and forward-looking nature. The GDC, by contrast, is narrowly focused on today’s crises. WSIS should not dilute its broader vision to accommodate a reactive, short-term policy process. It’s important to remember that the GDC exists because WSIS came first. The CSTD resolution offers thoughtful recommendations on how these two processes can be meaningfully aligned—but the Elements Paper largely ignores them. The Ugly The paper’s treatment of Internet governance is where it truly falters. Paragraph 59 proclaims: “The governance of the Internet should be multilateral, transparent and democratic, with the full involvement of governments, the private sector, civil society and international organisations.” While this may sound familiar—it echoes language from the 2005 Tunis Agenda—it is stripped of its original context. Worse, it subtly recasts Internet governance as a multilateral process rather than a multistakeholder one. This rhetorical shift represents a serious departure from two decades of practice and consensus, in which civil society, the private sector, and technical communities worked alongside governments to co-develop global norms and principles. Tellingly, the Elements Paper omits the WSIS-agreed working definition of Internet governance: “The development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.” This definition should be reinstated in the Zero Draft as it has provided essential clarity over the years and continues to reflect the distributed nature of authority in the Internet ecosystem. The document also revisits the issue of “enhanced cooperation”—a long-standing source of controversy stemming from vague language in the Tunis Agenda. Two UN-convened Working Groups on Enhanced Cooperation (WGEC), in 2013 and 2016, were tasked with clarifying how governments might play a greater role in shaping Internet-related public policy. Both failed. Political divisions—particularly between those favoring state-led models and those defending multistakeholderism—led to deadlock. Neither group produced substantive recommendations, only compilations of competing visions. Given this history, one has to ask: what makes us think the deadlock can be overcome now, especially in today’s even more polarized geopolitical environment? Here’s the truth: the debate around enhanced cooperation is outdated—and arguably resolved. It was effectively realized through the 2016 IANA stewardship transition, in which the U.S. government relinquished control of core Internet functions to the global Internet community. The GDC process further demonstrates that governments are, in fact, cooperating—sometimes uncomfortably—with other stakeholders to shape digital norms. To rehash this debate now is to miss how far we've already come. Conclusion WSIS’s founding vision—to build a people-centered, inclusive, and development-oriented Information Society—remains as vital as ever. But keeping that vision alive means more than reciting familiar language. It requires political courage, clarity of purpose, and institutional memory. The Elements Paper, as it stands, risks undermining twenty years of progress by relitigating settled debates, downplaying human rights, and allowing newer processes like the GDC to eclipse the enduring relevance of WSIS. The Internet is facing real threats—fragmentation, censorship, inequality—and the institutions tasked with safeguarding it must meet the moment. That means reaffirming the multistakeholder approach, placing human rights at the center, and ensuring that the next twenty years of Internet governance build on, rather than abandon, the hard-earned lessons of the past. Comments are closed.
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