APC priorities IGF2025
1. Introduction
The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) believes that the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) plays a central role in the digital technologies governance landscape. There is no other forum that offers the same opportunities for public engagement, collective learning and tracking progress toward inclusive, human rights-based and people-focused digital governance, or for examining the internet's impacts – both positive and negative – through a multidisciplinary and multistakeholder lens.
Moreover the IGF's evolution has demonstrated that one of its key strengths is its capacity to foster critical discussions, provide a platform for sharing national and local experiences as well as global trends, and explore ways to address the varied challenges faced by individuals, groups and communities in their specific contexts. This makes the IGF an invaluable forum for meaningful dialogue among diverse stakeholders.
In the midst of the WSIS+20 review, there is a need to recognise that the IGF has evolved into the world’s foremost and most inclusive forum for dialogue on digital governance as a basis to establish it as a permanent forum, ensuring that it has the resources to strengthen its capacity and reach.
Below, we provide some basic information about the 2025 annual meeting, as well as highlight this year’s strategic priorities for APC.
1.2 Themes
The 20th edition of the global Internet Governance Forum, under the overarching theme Building Digital Governance Together, will happen as a hybrid event, to be held online and in Lillestrøm, Norway, from 23 to 27 June 2025.
The meeting programme is guided by the following sub-themes:
- [Building] Digital Trust and Resilience
- [Building] Sustainable and Responsible Innovation
- [Building] Universal Access and Digital Rights
- [Building] Digital Cooperation
1.3 Hybrid modality
As in previous years, the IGF sessions will have speakers/moderators/rapporteurs participating entirely online or in a mixed setting. APC welcomes the valuable efforts to include diverse stakeholders from different time zones in the sessions, also acknowledging the challenges that it will present for participants wanting to join from other regions.
1.4 Types of sessions and spaces
The programme is organised in main sessions, workshops, open fora, town halls, networking sessions, lightning talks, launches/awards, Dynamic Coalitions (DC) and Best Practice Forum sessions, and National, Regional and Youth Initiative (NRI) sessions. A high-level, a parliamentary and a youth track will also take place. The full agenda can be found here.
APC staff and members will be engaged in a number of these sessions. Check the APC agenda for the 2025 IGF here.
During the IGF, interested stakeholders can display or distribute relevant information about their internet governance-related activities at the IGF Village, which has both physical and virtual display booths, located in the meeting's exhibition area and online. APC will have a physical booth at the Village (A02-10), where visitors will be able to learn more about our priorities and campaigns, engage in activities, and find interesting materials.
2. Situation with visas
Despite the efforts by the host country and the IGF Secretariat to facilitate participation of different stakeholders, some of our members and staff located in Global South countries have experienced difficulties going through the visa process and obtaining it.
As a human rights and feminist global networked organisation composed of more than 80 organisational members and dozens of associates active in 74 countries and more than 50 staff, most of them situated in the Global South, we are deeply concerned by the difficulties faced by people in obtaining visas for Norway. APC does not see this situation as isolated from systemic barriers and increasingly discriminatory practices across the board with regard to travel and migratory policies for people from the Global South, Africa in particular.
Our work is driven by the vision of a just and sustainable world, where the internet is shaped and governed as a global public good. We believe in the collective strength of activists, civil society organisations, marginalised communities and social movements to challenge entrenched power dynamics and influence the direction of digital governance.
However, restrictive and discriminatory travel policies hinder meaningful participation in crucial global decision-making and non-decision-making spaces. These barriers silence the voices of those most impacted by digital policies, excluding them from in-person convenings, networking, advocacy, and the opportunity to shape agendas that define our digital present and future.
We acknowledge and appreciate the openness and willingness of the host country representatives at the IGF multistakeholder advisory group (MAG) and their team to facilitate visas for members of our network.
As for future host countries, it is essential that governments demonstrate a genuine commitment to easing visa restrictions. This includes implementing visa-free regimes or streamlining the processes, particularly for participants from the Global South, especially Africa. Host governments should brief their embassies and consulates early on the importance of facilitating access for all delegates, and an accountability mechanism should be established to address non-compliance.
Inclusive internet governance depends on the active participation of all stakeholders – especially governments – in ensuring equitable mobility. It is their shared responsibility to guarantee that individuals from diverse backgrounds and with different passports can cross borders safely, and with dignity, to take part in shaping our digital future.
3. APC’s thematic priorities at the IGF 2025
3.1 Financing self-sustaining community connectivity solutions
Large and persistent digital divides continue to underscore the difficulties of achieving the goal of universal access. It has increasingly been recognised in many internet governance fora, including the IGF, community connectivity initiatives play a role in closing the gap. Most recently, the Global Digital Compact (GDC), adopted by the United Nations, included the commitment to invest in local networks as a way to address persistent digital exclusion. However, creating financing mechanisms to address the needs of these types of initiatives has been a challenge dating back to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), and little progress has been made to date.
Part of the problem stems from reliance on traditional telecommunication operators to close the digital divide, which in turn is reflected in policy and regulatory frameworks designed for their national scale and centralised ways of operating. Similarly, most financial instruments available are designed for these large operators and their multimillion dollar telecommunication infrastructure projects. Developing new strategies that can close the digital divide by addressing the gaps where these operators cannot meet their return on investment targets, requires exploring innovative financial solutions that can be made available to community connectivity and other local initiatives.
APC will have sessions to present novel research and discuss how community connectivity initiatives, as contributors to the social and solidarity economy, could be recipients of blended finance and other innovative financial mechanisms that multilateral funds and national development banks, and other members of the finance community, could make available to close the digital divide.
3.2 The value of the IGF and the importance of its future role
The IGF, in both its global and regional iterations, continues to play a central role as a multistakeholder platform that anticipates and shapes the digital policy agenda. It provides space to address emerging issues like artificial intelligence, data governance, and cybersecurity while continuing responding to digital inclusion imperatives – often before these topics are taken up in formal intergovernmental forums. Overall, the IGF stands as one of the strongest pathways for dismantling digital inequity globally.
With its impressive track record, we wish to see the IGF mandate made permanent and strengthened so it can continue to grow and serve as a central space for multistakeholder engagement.
APC believes that IGF is well suited to build ownership and support the implementation of the GDC and contribute to shape the future of WSIS, playing a key role in connecting the different processes, nurturing them with inputs for policy decision-making and contributing to build synergies between them. It is also a unique space for bringing to practice the principles of multistakeholder participation and collaboration, particularly the NETmundial+10 Multistakeholder Statement (São Paulo Guidelines), whose learnings can be extrapolated to other processes, including multilateral ones, to ensure that the perspectives and realities all those affected by digitalisation, particularly historically marginalised groups, are taken into consideration in internet governance and digital technologies policies at all levels.
The continuation and strengthening of the IGF's mandate is essential. To ensure its long-term sustainability and effectiveness, there is a growing need for greater institutionalisation of the IGF. The WSIS+20 review presents a key opportunity to advance this discussion and reinforce the IGF’s role amid an evolving digital governance landscape. Practically, this includes exploring more predictable and sustainable financing models beyond current voluntary contributions, as emphasised in the IGF Multistakeholder Advisory Group’s Vision for the IGF Beyond 2025.
Our executive director, Chat Garcia Ramilo, will bring APC’s perspectives to the Main Session, The impact of the IGF in the Information society.
3.3 The IGF community and the WSIS+20 Review: An opportunity for achieving digital justice
Twenty years ago, the WSIS articulated a vision and key values that still today are key for the configuration of the digital future as well as digital global policies, governance and cooperation. APC considers the IGF 2025 as a key moment in the WSIS+20 Review roadmap to discuss how the process could be used to contribute operationalise global digital cooperation and bridge the gap between deliberative spaces and decision-making processes, as well as to ensure that the review takes into account the need to make the internet and other digital technologies and their governance more inclusive, human rights-based and compliant with environmental and gender justice goals and, ultimately, digital justice.
In the context of the WSIS+20 review, the IGF is a privileged space to discuss possible ways to create a just digital future for most people, without leaving marginalised communities behind. Together with IT for Change, APC is launching a campaign to bring the perspective of the Global Digital Justice Forum to advocate for a bold, people-first agenda for reclaiming the digital future. As part of its agenda, we argue that global digital governance today is largely shaped by corporate influence and state authority, deviating from the ideals set forth by WSIS two decades ago, and present a call to action for WSIS+20 and beyond.
As part of the Global Digital Rights Coalition for WSIS (GDRC-WSIS), we will promote a human rights-based, people-centric and multistakeholder approach to the WSIS+20 review process at the IGF 2025 and will offer practical recommendations to ensure transparency, inclusivity and meaningful stakeholder engagement in the WSIS+20 review process.
We expect the IGF 2025 to extract the forum’s messages to feed into the WSIS+20 Review and will contribute to provide inputs through the sessions on the process in Norway.
3.4 Securing access to the internet and protecting core internet resources
In the wake of ongoing conflicts, crises and genocides in several places of the planet, it is increasingly essential and urgent to secure access, infrastructure and other core internet resources for civilian populations.
At IGF 2024, the main session, Protecting internet infrastructure and general access during times of crisis and conflict, highlighted the need for coordinated efforts and stakeholder collaboration to protect core internet infrastructure and ensure access to the internet in contexts of conflicts and crises. It is a key priority for the APC in the framework of the IGF 2025 to actively engage with policy and governance dialogues and contribute to explore norms, both voluntary and those that are enshrined in international law, oriented towards safeguarding internet access and stability during times of crisis and conflict. It is also paramount to discuss the roles and responsibilities of different stakeholders, such as governments, private sector, technical community and civil society, in implementing these guidelines and overseeing compliance.
4. Communications – Follow APC online at IGF 2025
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Media contacts: leila@apc.org in English and Spanish (on-site).
For any other aspects relating to APC's participation at IGF contact valeriab@apc.org.
Find a schedule of IGF events organised by APC and its members.
Check out the preparatory recommended resources.
If you are on-site at the IGF, come visit APC at our booth!