IGF 2023 Town Hall #170 Multistakeholder platform regulation and the Global South

Digital platforms have gained significant traction within Internet Governance debates, particularly as they have become essential tools for global, large-scale public and private communications. Numerous initiatives, groups, and organizations are trying to cope with regulating digital platforms at various levels. However, a great part of the discussions revolves around the models followed by Europe and US, that, as many point out, are then exported to global south countries, as the so-called Brussels Effect, limiting how regulations are adapted to local and regional contexts. Countries in the global south are in different stages of institutional development considering governmental bureaucracy, civil society organization or regional international organizations. Governance arrangements that may work in the global north may fail in Latin American countries. In Brazil, for instance, multistakeholderism has played a fundamental role in strengthening civil society participation through the means of the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee which plays a relevant role in the local internet governance model. Equating the (i) (de)concentration of decision-making poles and (ii) the public/private protagonism in a governance model, in order to orchestrate the ensemble of institutional capacities in face of the digital platforms’ power is not trivial. Beyond that, national and regional approaches aiming to establish a sustainable platform regulation models should also consider the challenges to align them with ongoing international processes, such as the Global Digital Compact, WSIS+20 and the UNESCO Guidelines for Regulating Digital Platforms. Last but not least, expectations over multistakeholderism in the global Internet Governance realm have been questioned in several policy arenas addressing those issues. This workshop aims to delve into different digital platform regulation governance models through the exchange of global south countries’ practices and discuss the role of State and non-State stakeholders vis a vis the value of the Internet Governance multistakeholder model.