The Internet Ungovernance Forum Opens in Brazil

By raincoaster on November 9, 2015 • ( 0 )

Internet Ungovernance Forum

We at the Cryptosphere are very proud to support the Internet Ungovernance Forum from the Pirate Party International. The conference runs from November 9-13 in Paraíba, Brazil, and features some of the most prominent names in the world of digital freedoms.

It began in Turkey as a counterpoint to the more establishmentarian Internet Governance Forum, giving voice to those shut out by organizations and individuals in control of the digital pipeline.

Speakers include Canada’s own Gabriella Coleman, the only professor of anthropology who has specialized in the study of Anonymous.

Birgitta Jonsdottir, the Pirate MP of Iceland, will be speaking Tuesday along with David Miranda, who has been detained on the basis of simply being the husband of “inconvenient” journalist Glenn Greenwald. Other speakers include Adriano Belisario, Danny O’Brien, Theo Oliveira, and Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay.

All of the talks are being livestreamed, so you can follow along in real time. We’ll have the embeds just as soon as we have a YouTube or Vimeo URL for each one.

Press Release:

Internet Ungovernance Forum Brazil is for those of us who demand free, secure, and open internet for all!

The IUF are organising the Internet Ungovernance Forum on 9th – 13th November 2015, for everyone who demands that fundamental freedoms, openness, unity and net neutrality remain the building blocks of the Internet…

Their objective is to talk about the true and real problems of the internet, how can we solve them and to chart a path for action…

The forum will be in parallel to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) 2015 which will also be held in João Pessoa in November. Interested parties all around the world will join and follow this important event. However, we see that at IGF the most urgent problems of the Internet do not get proper attention. Due to its format, the main perpetrators of many of the Internet’s problems, for example the governments and corporations, are getting representation in IGF that they don’t deserve. Given these circumstances, they decided to take initiative to defend the Internet as we know it and to create a parallel space to raise the voices of civil society initiatives, activists and common people…

For us, the most vital problems today are censorship and freedom of speech; surveillance and privacy; excessive commercialisation and super-monopolies; protective, prohibitionist and conservative governance approaches; awful governance examples as in the case of Brazil and the list goes on. Further, we do not see any of these problems independent of the greater political, social and economic contexts in which the Internet and related digital infrastructures are embedded in…

We want to reclaim the Internet as a fundamental infrastructure of our societies, cities, education, health, work, media, communications, culture and everyday activities…

We call on our participants to resist seeing the problems of the Internet as only technological and void of its materiality…