EuroSSIG brings together fellows with various backgrounds to promote a better understanding of the global Internet Governance controversy and to provide comprehensive and structured knowledge on the various aspects of Internet Governance.
Its annual one-week program covers the political, legal, economic, socio-cultural and technological dimensions of the governance of the Internet as well as issues like human rights, cybercrime, privacy and intellectual property. The course includes also practical oriented lectures about the management of critical Internet resources (CIR) like domain names, IP addresses, root servers and Internet protocols.
“Internet governance is not yet an established academic discipline you can study at a university’s faculty”, Wolfgang Kleinwächter, founder and chair of the EuroSSIG faculty said. “It is a multidisciplinary issue which crosses law, business, history, political, social and cultural science, informatics and mathematics and it has a very practical component. This special kind of knowledge is needed by a broad range of various constituencies working in the Internet world”.
The establishment of the EuroSSIG goes back to discussions within the UN Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG), which was established by the former UN Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, to prepare the 2nd phase of the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis (2005).