How ODET is Trying to Hijack WSIS — and Why That Should Alarm Everyone

If you haven’t been following the quiet bureaucratic war over the future of WSIS, here’s the short version: the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies (ODET) is trying to take control of it.

In its submission to the WSIS+20 Zero Draft — available here — ODET lays out what looks, at first glance, like harmless institutional housekeeping. But look closer, and you’ll see something more ambitious: an attempt to quietly centralize power over digital governance inside the UN system, rewrite the WSIS architecture, and turn a bottom-up, decentralized process into a top-down bureaucracy.

From Coordination to Control

The key move in ODET’s submission is its push to take over the coordination of UNGIS — the UN Group on the Information Society — and make it permanent. It calls for a “permanent secretariat” and an “expanded membership.”

On paper, that sounds tidy. In practice, it means ODET would control the staff, the agenda, and the information flows that shape UN digital policy. It’s like putting one department in charge of refereeing an entire ecosystem — and then giving it the power to rewrite the rules.
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The proposal also suggests integrating the Global Digital Compact (GDC) into the WSIS architecture, positioning ODET as the bridge (and gatekeeper) between the two. That’s not coordination; that’s consolidation. And it comes wrapped in the kind of bland technocratic language that usually hides major power grabs: “efficiency,” “agility,” “avoiding duplication.”

Translation: we’ll make things simpler by putting them all under our control.

Killing the WSIS Spirit

For those who remember what WSIS was meant to support — a multistakeholder, bottom-up, inclusive process — ODET’s vision is a betrayal.

The WSIS model was built on decentralized governance — the idea that no single institution, not even the UN, should dictate how the digital world is managed. Instead, it should be an open ecosystem of governments, civil society, the private sector, and the technical community working together, loosely coordinated but not controlled.

ODET’s approach flips that logic. It replaces the distributed “network” model of governance with a hierarchical chain of command. Under its proposal, UNGIS becomes the hub, ODET the hub’s operator, and everyone else — from civil society to regional networks — mere “stakeholders” in an architecture they no longer co-own.

That’s not coordination. That’s capture.

Empire Building in the Name of “Coherence”

Let’s be honest: ODET’s submission isn’t about the future of Internet governance. It’s about building an empire inside the UN system.

1. Institutional consolidation — ODET gains control over secretariats, agendas, and interagency coordination.
2. Resource consolidation — once ODET becomes the “hub,” funding and attention naturally flow toward it.
3. Narrative consolidation — by linking WSIS, GDC, and UNGIS, ODET becomes the indispensable brand for all things “digital.”

All of this happens under the comforting rhetoric of “strengthening coordination.” But the effect is to sideline the very stakeholders who made WSIS credible in the first place, in particular regional voices.

The WSIS process has always been messy, slow, and imperfect. That’s the point. It was designed to resist capture — to ensure that no single actor could dominate the global conversation on the information society. ODET’s “streamlining” threatens to erase that diversity and replace it with UN bureaucracy.

Why This Matters

This isn’t an internal turf war. It’s about who gets to shape the future of the Internet — and how.

If ODET’s plan succeeds, Internet governance will become less open, less accountable, and less flexible. Decisions that once required broad consultation could instead become centralized, quiet, and procedural. Stakeholder participation would be reframed as “input,” not “influence.” The Internet’s future would be negotiated through PowerPoint decks rather than public dialogue. We have already seen a preview of this during the Global Digital Compact process, which ODET kept tightly controlled and far less inclusive than the ongoing WSIS+20 review.

And once a UN office claims the center of gravity in digital governance, good luck taking it back. Bureaucratic empires rarely shrink; they expand.

Reclaiming the WSIS Legacy

The Internet governance community — from governments to NGOs to technical experts — must push back clearly and publicly.

Here’s what that means:

• Demand transparency. Any proposal to restructure WSIS or UNGIS should spell out governance safeguards, participation rules, and accountability mechanisms.
• Reaffirm the bottom-up model. WSIS must remain a platform for distributed, multistakeholder coordination — not a UN silo.
• Insist on pluralism. There must be space for multiple institutions, processes, and voices — not one “official” center.
• Mobilize counter-proposals. Civil society and technical actors should draft alternative frameworks that preserve WSIS’s open architecture.

​If we care about keeping Internet governance open, we can’t sleepwalk through this. ODET’s submission might sound like administrative housekeeping — but it’s more like a hostile takeover.

WSIS was never supposed to be owned. It was meant to be messy, participatory, and alive. If ODET gets its way, that spirit will die quietly in the footnotes of a UN report.