Internet Society WSIS+20 Implementation Non-Paper
An ISOC LIVE Summary
Date: 3 July 2026
This Internet Society non-paper examines how the commitments made during the 2025 WSIS+20 review can be translated into measurable action over the coming decade. Rather than revisiting the political outcomes of WSIS+20, it focuses on implementation, arguing that the success of the framework will depend on practical roadmaps, a strengthened Internet Governance Forum (IGF), and financing mechanisms capable of delivering real-world results.
Executive Summary
The paper begins by noting that the December 2025 WSIS+20 outcome document reaffirmed the multistakeholder model, made the IGF a permanent institution, and confirmed the WSIS Action Lines as the principal framework for digital development through 2035. However, it argues that these commitments alone will not close the connectivity gap affecting 2.2 billion people or improve online safety. Success will depend upon effective implementation, meaningful measurement, and institutional accountability.
To support this next phase, the paper proposes three areas of action:
Develop practical implementation roadmaps with measurable outcomes.
Strengthen the Internet Governance Forum.
Expand financing through blended and collaborative funding models.
Roadmaps and Measurements
The paper argues that the requirement for Action Line facilitators to produce implementation roadmaps by 2027 presents an opportunity to shift WSIS from broad aspirations toward measurable progress.
Rather than simply restating existing commitments, effective roadmaps should:
establish current baselines;
recognize differing national contexts, ideally through a maturity model;
describe a theory of change linking interventions to outcomes;
define measurable indicators and milestones;
identify responsible stakeholders;
specify review mechanisms tied to the WSIS Forum, CSTD sessions, and SDG review cycles.
The paper emphasizes that implementation should measure outcomes rather than activity. For example, counting workshops held says little about whether digital skills actually improve. Likewise, roadmaps should evolve over time as evidence accumulates and implementation experience reveals more effective approaches.
It also stresses that reliable implementation depends on adequate data collection. The paper illustrates the problem with regional ICT backbones, also covered by Action Line C2, paragraph 9(j): meaningful indicators on fiber coverage, route diversity, and capacity require data that operators and regulators hold in incompatible formats with no common sharing standard. The Open Fibre Data Standard (OFDS), which the Internet Society developed with the World Bank, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and others, supplies that schema; its adoption would make baseline assessment and progress tracking possible. Where data gaps exist, the paper argues, they belong in the roadmap design rather than being treated as an afterthought.
Coordination across Action Lines is a second dependency. Connectivity initiatives require complementary progress in enabling regulation, capacity building, cybersecurity, and local content development.
Example Roadmap: Internet Exchange Points (IXPs)
To illustrate its methodology, the annex develops a complete implementation roadmap for Action Line C2 relating to Internet Exchange Points (IXPs).
The paper explains that IXPs:
reduce international transit costs;
improve latency and network performance;
strengthen resilience through additional routing paths;
encourage local hosting and content ecosystems.
Current global deployment remains uneven:
1,063 active IXPs worldwide;
93 countries still lack an IXP;
44 IXPs across 22 of the 44 Least Developed Countries (50% coverage);
38 IXPs across 24 of the 57 Small Island Developing States (42% coverage).
Regionally, Europe leads with 357 IXPs, followed by Asia-Pacific (315), North America (187), Latin America and the Caribbean (133), Africa (71), and the Middle East (28). The figures come from the Internet Society Pulse IXP Tracker.
The roadmap identifies common barriers including:
market concentration, where incumbents have little incentive to peer locally;
weak regulatory environments;
insufficient technical capacity;
sustainability challenges for smaller IXPs;
evolving CDN peering policies, with some providers raising minimum traffic thresholds — a barrier for smaller IXPs seeking to attract and retain these catalytic partners.
Implementation is organized around four maturity stages:
Awareness and consensus building.
Policy and regulatory development.
Technical deployment and operational support.
Long-term ecosystem sustainability.
The paper is explicit that these stages are not strictly sequential: a country may require interventions from several stages at once, and in some markets stages need to be pursued in tandem. Approximately 32 countries currently fall into the first stage, along with several where IXPs have become non-operational.
Illustrative milestones extend to the 2035 WSIS review, including reducing the number of countries without IXPs from a 2027 baseline of 93 to fewer than 10, expanding coverage across LDCs and SIDS, increasing locally cached content, and improving the financial sustainability of IXPs. The paper labels these figures as illustrative, extrapolated from historical growth of roughly 6% to 8% year over year. Review points are pegged to the CSTD’s 30th session in 2027, the 2028 WSIS Forum, the 2030 SDG and GDC reviews, and the 2035 WSIS high-level review. The roadmap also explicitly identifies dependencies on Action Lines covering enabling regulation (C6), local content (C8), capacity building (C4), and cybersecurity (C5).
Strengthening the Internet Governance Forum
The paper argues that making the IGF permanent is only the beginning. Long-term effectiveness requires institutional improvements while preserving the forum’s multistakeholder character. The recommendations in this section draw on contributions to an Internet Society community consultation held in early 2026.
Sustainable funding
The first recommendation addresses financing.
The paper distinguishes between:
stable funding for the IGF Secretariat itself, via the UN Trust Fund;
dedicated support for National, Regional, Subregional, and Youth IGF Initiatives (NRIs), Schools of Internet Governance, and intersessional work.
It recommends:
a predictable UN baseline for the Trust Fund, complemented by a diversified multi-year pool;
a dedicated NRI funding stream, distinct from the Trust Fund;
a shift from annual pledges to multi-year commitments from Member States and voluntary donors;
annual public reporting by the Secretariat covering both the Trust Fund and NRI support.
It notes that NRIs increasingly represent the places where multistakeholder dialogue occurs throughout the year and where local Internet governance capacity develops — and that they are where the multistakeholder model is most tested, as civic space narrows in many parts of the world. The joint ICANN and Internet Society report “Footprints of 20 Years of the Internet Governance Forum” documents more than 180 national and regional IGFs functioning as a decentralized backbone of year-round dialogue. The Internet Society Foundation’s existing grant program for NRIs and schools of Internet governance is offered as a proof of concept others could adopt and scale.
Government participation
The paper supports broader government participation as requested in the WSIS+20 outcome but argues that governments should participate within—not alongside—the multistakeholder process.
Rather than creating new structures, and in line with the IGF Expert Group Meeting recommendations of May 2026, it recommends strengthening the existing day-zero ministerial engagement and parliamentary track — tasking the Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG) with redesigning both — while developing a standing pre-IGF briefing and capacity-building program for government delegates.
The objective is to improve government engagement without creating parallel processes that weaken the IGF’s inclusive model.
Better integration into the WSIS framework
The paper also recommends closer integration between the IGF ecosystem and broader WSIS implementation. As a result of the WSIS+20 review, the IGF will now report its outcomes to the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD), which in turn contributes to the work of the UN Group on the Information Society (UNGIS).
Building on that structure, it proposes:
theme-setting by the MAG no later than nine months before the global meeting;
multi-year work programmes for issues needing sustained attention;
stronger incorporation of outputs from Dynamic Coalitions, Best Practice Forums, and NRIs;
a standing Secretariat reporting mechanism channeling NRI and intersessional outputs into CSTD review cycles;
a standing CSTD agenda item on IGF outcomes, formally requested by Member States;
alignment with WSIS Action Lines and the Global Digital Compact.
The paper argues that these changes would allow IGF outputs to remain relevant throughout the year rather than only during the annual meeting.
Financing WSIS Implementation
The third section examines financing for digital development.
It reviews traditional funding sources:
official development assistance;
multilateral development banks;
development finance institutions;
philanthropic funding.
While acknowledging their continuing importance, the paper argues that none individually can meet the scale of investment needed — estimated in the trillions of dollars annually to meet the SDGs. It notes that the World Bank Group has leveraged USD $29 billion in shareholder capital into roughly USD $1.5 trillion in development finance, and that the ten largest philanthropic foundations account for over USD $8.6 billion in development spending, while ODA flows have become declining and volatile.
Blended finance
Blended finance combines concessional public or philanthropic funding with commercial investment to reduce risk and mobilize additional private capital. The paper stresses that the objective is not to substitute for private capital but to selectively absorb or mitigate risks markets cannot price, and that such mechanisms work best when tightly aligned to specific market failures.
Citing Convergence Capital, the paper reports that blended finance in international development reached USD $18.3 billion in 2024, down from a peak of USD $23.1 billion in 2023. BDO Digital anticipated that in 2026, amid a retraction in bilateral donor funding, the nonprofit sector would turn to blended finance as an alternative form of capital.
The paper highlights this approach as particularly valuable for community networks and smaller Internet service providers, where grants alone are insufficient to support expansion; loan guarantees at favorable rates are what these networks need.
Collaborative funding
Collaborative funding pools resources from governments, philanthropies, multilateral organizations, and private donors. The paper notes that over 300 collaborative funds had been identified globally as of early 2025, many established in the past decade.
Examples include:
the Internet Society Connectivity Co-Funding Initiative;
the Common Good Cyber Fund (CGCF), which supports civil society cybersecurity through pooled donations from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the German Federal Foreign Office, Global Affairs Canada, the Internet Society, and the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The paper recommends that the new ITU-led financing task force build upon these existing models rather than designing entirely new mechanisms. It also urges the task force to consult both funding providers and organizations implementing projects on the ground, noting that assessments of financing tend to capture the perspective of capital suppliers while recipients hold the insight into when a mechanism succeeds and where it stalls.
Conclusion
The paper concludes that successful WSIS+20 implementation depends on converting high-level commitments into measurable action. It argues that practical implementation roadmaps, stronger institutional support for the IGF, and innovative financing mechanisms together can transform the WSIS framework into an effective vehicle for expanding connectivity, narrowing digital divides, and improving online safety and trust over the next decade.
RESOURCES
Internet Society — author of the non-paper
UN A/RES/80/173 — the December 2025 WSIS+20 review outcome document
Geneva Plan of Action (2003) — sets Action Line C2, paragraph 9(j) on IXPs and regional ICT backbones
Tunis Agenda (2005) — endorsed the multistakeholder model and established the IGF
Internet Society 2030 Strategy — the strategic priorities the non-paper draws on
Internet Society Pulse — IXP Tracker — data source for the roadmap’s deployment baselines
Footprints of 20 Years of the Internet Governance Forum — joint ICANN/ISOC report documenting 180+ national and regional IGFs
IGF Expert Group Meeting Report — May 2026 recommendations cited on government participation
ISOC Foundation — NRI and Schools of Internet Governance grants — the proof of concept offered for NRI funding
WSIS Forum 2026 — the convening platform where 2028 progress review is slated
Open Fibre Data Standard — the schema the paper offers as its data-availability fix
Connectivity Co-Funding Initiative — the Internet Society’s collaborative funding vehicle
Common Good Cyber Fund — collaborative funding model for civil society cybersecurity
Convergence — State of Blended Finance — source of the $18.3bn 2024 figure
Bridgespan — The Philanthropic Collaborative Landscape — source of the 300+ collaborative funds count
Dissecting the cost of peering: Global evidence from internet exchange points — underlies the paper’s peering-intensity and revenue findings