- The UN says multiple stakeholders are needed to create a human-centered internet
- There are still concerns about access, abuse and the environment
- AI also had an entire section dedicated to its risks
The UN General Assembly has reached an agreement on who should govern the internet, and it’s good news for censorship, with a multi-stakeholder model coming out on top.
Under this governance, “Governments, the private sector, civil society, international organizations, the technical and academic communities and other stakeholders” will all have an impact, remaining in line with the vision set out at the 2003 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) for a human-centered Internet.
“We reaffirm our commitment to the vision of the World Summit on the Information Society to build a human-centred, inclusive and development-oriented information society where everyone can create, access, use and share information and knowledge,” the UN writes in its outcome document.
UN: No single body should control the Internet
In its document of 16 December 2025, the UN acknowledged that a number of developing countries still face barriers not only to access to the Internet but also to stakeholder participation in governance matters. International cooperation, financing and private-public partnerships were highlighted as some key solutions.
The UN is also concerned about affordability and access to the Internet; gender divisions; exclusion of vulnerable groups such as older people, indigenous peoples and migrants; human rights violations; misuse of digital technologies for things like cybercrime, surveillance and child exploitation; misinformation and disinformation; and the environmental impacts of digitalisation.
The document, submitted by the president of the General Assembly and German politician Annalena Baerbock, even has an entire section dedicated to artificial intelligence, in which the UN both recognizes the technology’s benefits for humanity and highlights unknown risks associated with development speed, scale and autonomy.
Among the human-centered decisions are calls for more education and training, open source models, accessible training data, and wider access to high-performance computing infrastructure.
The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has now become a permanent UN body, where previously it was just an annual meeting.
The next review is set for 2035, with the UN calling on all stakeholders to get involved across all phases of the process to “identify areas of continued focus.”
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews and opinions in your feeds. Be sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can too follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, video unboxings, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp also.
