By emeka aginam

The International Chamber of Commerce, ICC) Business Action to support the Information Society (BASIS) initiative has reaffirmed its support for the unique Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and urged that participation remains open to all and that discussions on Internet policy take development issues into consideration.

The call was made last week at the first round of open consultations for the biggest Internet-policy related event of the year, in Geneva.

“The IGF has a special role in building human and institutional capacity regarding Internet policy issues. As further improvements are discussed or envisioned, we must keep the essential ingredients of the IGF foremost in our minds, otherwise there is a risk that this one-of-a-kind opportunity will be lost,” Herbert Heitmann, Royal Dutch Shell’s Executive Vice President of External Communications and Chair of the ICC Commission on E-Business, IT and Telecoms, said.

The consultations, he said, aim to shape the programme for the next round of the forum by taking stock and building on the experience of last year’s event, which took place in Vilnius, Lithuania. ICC/BASIS contributed business priorities and recommended the integration of the theme ‘building an innovation economy’ for the 2011 Forum, which is scheduled to take place in Nairobi, Kenya in September.

ICC/BASIS applauded the considerable increase in remote participation achieved at the 2010 gathering and commended a debut IGF Secretariat best practices document comprising a series of practical recommendations that had emerged from focused sessions on a range of Internet governance issues.

“Exploring entrepreneurship and business creation as a means of development while focusing on the Internet governance issues that support them, will build on discussions engaged in at past IGFs,” said Ayesha Hassan, Senior Policy Manager and Executive in charge of Information and Communication Technologies Policy at ICC., adding that, “We also believe that the essential enabling environment components needed to attract investment in infrastructure will be key issues this year.”