ellenstrickland's blog

In 2020, issues of digital regulation look set to take centre stage, seeing business and political voices debate options on the global playing field of policies and treaties. These digital regulation issues are likely to include taxation of tech companies, social media content regulation, response to global cybercrime and the ‘cyberspace’ practices of countries themselves. These issues, and regulatory approaches taken, have the potential to impact the online experiences and offline lives of Internet users globally.

It’s been over six months since the Christchurch mosque attacks, and four months since the Christchurch Call was made. Tomorrow, there will be a meeting alongside the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York to take stock of progress on the Call. World leaders, company executives, United Nations representatives and others will come together to report back on what progress has been made and what plans lie ahead.

It’s been seven weeks since the Christchurch Call was made from Paris, led by Prime Minister Ardern, committing tech companies and governments to address terrorism and violent extremism online. From and since those meetings, companies and governments made a range of collective and individual commitments to action.

The “Christchurch Call’ meeting is being held in Paris on 15 May 2019. With this important conversation happening, we’ve been thinking about how we can help as many voices be heard as possible in these discussions.

This week our CE Jordan Carter and I have been attending the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Paris, an annual event where governments, business, technical community, academics and civil society organisations come together under the aegis of the United Nations to talk about Internet policy issues.

This week we launched our latest Position Paper, "Solving Digital Divides Together". Policy Director Ellen Strickland looks at why we are talking about digital divides, and where InternetNZ wants to go next.

We think that, as members of a global Internet community, societies need to protect human rights, especially rights to privacy as well as freedom of expression. We also want to put forward our thinking about a new right, related to privacy and technology. But to get there, we need to talk about the GDPR.

I wanted to invite people one last time to get involved and let you know the next steps, where the NetHui community will start bringing the 2017 programme together.

The purpose of the conference attendance community grants round is to help the New Zealand Internet community participate in relevant conferences and events related to the development of the Internet.