The Long Shadow of Enhanced Cooperation

In 2005, the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) convened in Tunis under the weight of a profound question: who should govern the Internet? As the Internet cemented its role as the backbone of global commerce, communication, and geopolitical influence, tensions escalated between those who had historically shaped its architecture and those who sought a greater role. At the heart of this debate was the United States’ entrenched influence over core infrastructure — particularly the Domain Name System (DNS) — juxtaposed with rising demands from countries like Brazil, China, India, and South Africa for a more equitable distribution of authority.

The summit concluded with a compromise that would shape the contours of this debate for years to come: the creation of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and a vague, enigmatic commitment to “enhanced cooperation.” While the IGF quickly established itself as the premier venue for multistakeholder dialogue, enhanced cooperation remained ambiguous—at once a promise of inclusivity and a battleground of competing visions. Nearly two decades later, this term lingers in diplomatic circles, elusive and unresolved, yet its endurance reflects a deeper tension that continues to animate debates over Internet governance: the unresolved contest between global multistakeholderism and sovereign multilateralism.

Origins of an Ambiguous Compromise

The term enhanced cooperation was conceived in the final hours of the WSIS negotiations, an eleventh-hour addition designed to salvage consensus amid ideological stalemate. The summit’s final document — The Tunis Agenda for the Information Society — articulated the term in Paragraph 69: “We further recognize the need for enhanced cooperation to enable governments, on an equal footing, to carry out their roles and responsibilities in international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet.” Crucially, the text omitted any definition of what such cooperation might entail or what institutional form it might assume.

This ambiguity was not accidental. It was a diplomatic sleight-of-hand, allowing each faction to leave the summit with its vision ostensibly intact. Proponents of the multistakeholder model saw it as affirming their view of shared responsibility among governments, civil society, the private sector, and the technical community, while advocates of a stronger intergovernmental role interpreted it as a concession toward sovereign oversight. In effect, enhanced cooperation became a vessel into which opposing sides poured incompatible meanings.

Post-Tunis Contestation and Institutional Paralysis
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In the aftermath of the 2005 WSIS, enhanced cooperation emerged as one of the most contested and misunderstood commitments in global Internet governance. Conceived as a way to ensure that governments could meaningfully participate in shaping international Internet-related public policy, it quickly became a diplomatic Rorschach test.
 
For many Western democracies and industry stakeholders, enhanced cooperation was interpreted as a principle that could be fulfilled within existing multistakeholder processes. They saw no contradiction between distributed, inclusive dialogues and legitimate policy influence. In this view, forums like the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), with their open, bottom-up ethos, offered a sufficient—if imperfect—venue for cooperation among governments, civil society, the private sector, and technical experts.
 
But to others, particularly in the Global South, this framing amounted to a sleight of hand. Enhanced cooperation, as they understood it, demanded more than inclusive conversation; it required concrete institutional change. Specifically, it meant rebalancing authority over Internet governance issues toward intergovernmental mechanisms—ideally under the auspices of the United Nations or the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). What Western actors saw as adequate, these states saw as evasion; what one side viewed as progress, the other read as stalling.
 
This disconnect produced a structural impasse and rather than evolving into a shared project, enhanced cooperation became a site of diplomatic estrangement. Year after year, working groups and consultations rehashed the same arguments, with little movement. The two sides spoke different political languages, animated by divergent visions of legitimacy, sovereignty, and institutional power. Enhanced cooperation remained suspended—neither fully dismissed nor meaningfully realized. It became, in effect, a placeholder for deeper disagreements over who should govern the Internet, and how.

The WGECs and the Failure to Define

Attempts to break this disagreement emerged through the United Nations’ Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD), which convened two Working Groups on Enhanced Cooperation (WGEC)—first in 2012 and then again in 2016. Both groups were tasked with the same mission: to explore how to operationalize Paragraph 69 of the Tunis Agenda. Both failed.

The first WGEC could not even agree on a working definition of enhanced cooperation, while the second produced extensive deliberations but similarly ended without consensus. Delegates entrenched themselves along familiar geopolitical lines, rendering the process incapable of delivering a shared vision. These failures were not simply procedural; they were symptomatic of deeper questions about legitimacy, authority, and power in the governance of the Internet.

A Symbolic Battleground in a Changing Digital Order

Today, enhanced cooperation functions more as a symbolic totem than a practical policy tool. For countries within the G77+, as well as advocates of digital sovereignty, it remains a rhetorical instrument—used to signal dissatisfaction with the current distribution of influence and to push for alternative models of governance. For others, particularly defenders of the status quo, it is a relic of a battle already won.

Yet this status quo is far from stable. The multistakeholder model, while resilient, faces growing strain from multiple directions, including the rise of authoritarian digital governance models, the erosion of trust in private tech monopolies, the increasing balkanization of digital regulation, and the mounting challenges posed by artificial intelligence. In this context, the continued invocation of enhanced cooperation reflects the enduring salience of the core issue it represents: the tension between the sovereign authority of states and the transnational nature of the Internet.

Toward a Constructive Reimagining

The Internet of 2025 bears little resemblance to that of 2005. Its governance institutions have evolved, new actors have emerged, and fresh challenges—such as algorithmic accountability, data governance, and AI regulation—now dominate the agenda. In this new reality, the concept of enhanced cooperation also requires reimagination. To do so, it must first be liberated from the semantic battles and institutional baggage of the past.

Attempts to define enhanced cooperation have proven fruitless. Instead of continuing to treat it as a definitional challenge or a monolithic project, it should be embraced as a dynamic, evolving process—one that accommodates a variety of formats, actors, and institutional experiments. It should be understood as a pathway for inclusion, particularly for those stakeholders who have felt marginal to Internet governance for the past two decades.

This includes not only governments from the Global South, but also civil society, the private sector, academic, and technical actors from these regions. For many of them, enhanced cooperation has served as a conceptual entry point—an aspirational demand for greater voice, recognition, and parity in global digital policymaking. Their concerns must be taken seriously.

A History in Motion

In this broader view, enhanced cooperation is not a static concept frozen in 2005, rather an ongoing process—one that has unfolded through a series of institutional moments: the establishment of the IGF in 2006 and the past twenty years of global IGF meetings, the WSIS+10 review in 2015, the IANA stewardship transition in 2016, and more recently, the 2024 Global Digital Compact and the WSIS+20 review in 2025. Each represents an iteration of enhanced cooperation in action, whether formally recognized or not.

Similarly, the expanding terrain of governance—encompassing data, platforms, content moderation, and AI—has generated new spaces for dialogue and decision-making: at the ITU, UNESCO, regional organizations, industry-led forums, and civil society coalitions. The proliferation of such venues suggests that enhanced cooperation is not a dead letter but a dispersed and pluralistic process already underway.

Conclusion: From Roadblock to Resource

It is time to stop viewing enhanced cooperation as a roadblock to Internet governance. Properly framed, it can serve as a bridge: enabling collaboration across geopolitical divides, promoting inclusive participation, and harmonizing policy approaches in an increasingly fragmented digital landscape. The goal should not be the creation of a new institution or the transfer of authority to intergovernmental bodies; rather, it should be to ensure that all stakeholders—especially those historically marginalized—can participate on equal footing in shaping the Internet’s future.

Ultimately, enhanced cooperation remains one of the Internet governance field’s most misunderstood concepts. Yet beneath its ambiguity lies a powerful idea: that global collaboration on digital policy must reflect the diversity of its users and the complexity of its challenges. In this light, enhanced cooperation is not an obstacle to be overcome, but a resource to be cultivated—an underused tool for realizing a more inclusive and effective digital future.