The UK Internet Governance Forum is a collaborative partnership between Nominet, the UK Department for Business and key parliamentarians.

Its aim is to provide a local forum in the UK that engages industry, government, parliament, academia and civil society in debate on Internet Governance issues. As well as encouraging partnerships and coalitions that deliver solutions and demonstrate best practice for others to learn from.

Other influential stakeholder groups that are taking part include the London Internet Exchange, the Coalition on Internet Safety and Amnesty International.

The UK IGF will concentrate on developing examples of UK best practice and serve as a potential prototype model for other national IGFs. Rt Hon Alun Michael MP commented that Tanya Byron’s recent review of the online child protection sphere has highlighted the successful partnership initiative between the Internet Watch Foundation and the Child Exploitation & Online Protection Unit. These organisations have successfully combined resources and expertise from law enforcement, Industry and the third sector as well as working closely with the Home Office’s Online Child Protection Task Force.

One of the key messages to emerge from the first UK IGF meeting is that the UK is taking a leading role in Internet governance, and that other countries are seeing what we are doing and beginning to start running their own processes at the national level. Brazil, France and Finland are among the first countries to follow the UK’s ‘best practice’ model. The UK is proving to the rest of the world that the Internet Governance Forum works, as a collaborative partnership between Government, business, civil society and academia, because it is not subject to Government legislation and is free from bureaucracy.