Welcome to 2024 in internet governance

2024 promises to be another big year for internet governance. In this blog post we highlight auDA's planned work and priorities for 2024.

Events that will shape the future of the internet are at the heart of our internet governance work this year. We'll be involved with a clear goal in mind: to champion, sustain and improve multi-stakeholder internet governance, a key facet of auDA's 2021-25 Strategy, as well as a requirement under auDA's Terms of Endorsement from the Australian Government.

auDA believes that multi-stakeholder governance that incorporates the contributions, perspectives and needs of diverse and relevant expertise is at the foundation of the internet's remarkable success in driving global innovation and economic development.

This aligns with auDA's domestic policy focus: to support digital transformation enabled by an open, free, secure and global internet, which is fundamental to unlocking positive social and economic value for all Australians. Underpinning our advocacy is our Internet Governance Roadmap (Roadmap). We published the Roadmap last year (see our blog introducing the Roadmap) and received support from several key stakeholders, including at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Kyoto (Oct 2023) (find more in our IGF highlights blog). The Roadmap sets out our views for evolving the current internet governance system so it can better succeed at sustaining an open, free, secure and global internet.

Here are some of our key focus areas planned for 2024:

• Collaborating with both the Australian and global multi-stakeholder community to contribute meaningfully to the global processes (Summit of the Future, Global Digital Compact, World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)+20 review, NetMundial+10) that are shaping the future of internet governance and the regulation of the digital policy space.
• Supporting and accelerating Australia's digital transformation through domestic advocacy consistent with our Public Policy Agenda. This includes contributing to legislative consultations, making submissions on policy proposals relating to digital identity, cyber security and privacy impacting Australia's digital environment, hosting domestic policy webinars and providing quarterly policy reports to update the community on recent developments.
• Building on the success of hosting Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (APrIGF) 2023 in Brisbane, continuing our engagement with the region.
• Convening stakeholders in Australia at roundtables to bring the internet governance community together and help build a stronger shared approach in responding to the changing internet governance environment, both nationally and globally.
• Supporting a refreshed scope for NetThing, Australia's IGF, which will be held later in 2024.
• Advocating and leading at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), through active participation in the Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) and its committees and in the wider ICANN environment, including on tackling Domain Name System (DNS) abuse.
• Building coalitions and better coordination with fellow country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) managers regionally (e.g. Asia Pacific Top Level Domain Association (APTLD), Pacific ccTLDs), globally (e.g. the Centre for European National Top Level Domain Registries (CENTR)) and in the broader internet governance system (e.g. the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC)).

We look forward to working together with our peers in the internet governance and public policy community and all interested stakeholders to further our internet governance and public policy goals this year.

You can keep an eye on the .au blog or follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter to stay across our work in this area, or get in touch with our team members to find out more.