Two decades after WSIS: Is the digital future people-centered?

By Javier Surasky


The World Summit on the Information Society (better known by its acronym WSIS) was established by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), following a proposal by Tunisia in 1998, to create a global forum for discussion around information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their impact on the international stage.

The United Nations General Assembly formally adopted the ITU’s proposal in its Resolution 56/183 of December 2001, which approved holding WSIS in two phases, while also recognizing the “urgent need to harness the potential of knowledge and technology” to promote the Millennium Development Goals.

The first phase of WSIS was held in Geneva in 2003, and the second in Tunis in 2005. The Geneva meeting adopted the Geneva Declaration of Principles and the Geneva Plan of Action, which established a vision and concrete commitments aimed at closing gaps in access to ICTs, boosting global connectivity, and laying the foundations for a people-centered Information Society focused on human development.

The Tunis phase focused particularly on debating and operationalizing the Plan of Action, while also seeking to reach agreements on sensitive issues that had not been resolved in Geneva, such as Internet governance, financing mechanisms for ICTs, and institutional arrangements for follow-up and implementation of the commitments. As a result, the Tunis Commitment and the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society were adopted, the latter serving as an accurate tool for implementing the agreed lines of action. One of its main outcomes was the establishment of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), created in paragraph 72 of the Tunis Agenda for a five-year term, which has since been continuously renewed.

Seen from a historical perspective, WSIS’s achievements include:

  • Providing not only a space for dialogue but also giving rise to a shared vocabulary on topics where “the digital” is central, in keeping with its original mandate to orient its outcomes toward development and the full respect of human rights.
  • Building a multistakeholder, multipartite, and multilevel governance approach to the digital ecosystem, a model that sets a precedent for global digital cooperation by recognizing the importance of having all interested actors at the negotiating table.

Among the mechanisms for monitoring commitments, we also find the creation of the WSIS Forum. This annual multistakeholder gathering acts as a global platform for reviewing progress on WSIS commitments, where good practices are shared and partnerships promoted. The Forum is organized by the ITU, which prepares it in collaboration with countries and more than 40 UN system agencies.

It is also worth noting that an institutional follow-up mechanism has been established for WSIS within the UN, under the responsibility of the Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD), a subsidiary body of ECOSOC.

A decade after the Geneva meeting, a review process called WSIS+10 was held in 2013. Two years later, within the broader international framework of concurrent negotiation processes, which led to the 2030 Agenda, the Paris Agreement, and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda. The General Assembly convened a High-Level Meeting in December 2015 to conduct a comprehensive review of the implementation of WSIS’s agreements and adopted documents. The meeting concluded with a final document reaffirming the vision and commitments of Geneva and Tunis and highlighting their alignment with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. That same resolution called for a new high-level meeting in 2025 to assess two decades of progress in building the Information Society, launching what is now known as the WSIS+20 process.

This process has had two key milestones: the WSIS+20 High-Level Forum in 2024 and the WSIS+20 High-Level Event, held from 7 to 11 July 2025, once again in Geneva, whose outcomes will be considered by the full membership of the United Nations in a special plenary session during the 79th session of the UN General Assembly to be held later in 2025.

In the WSIS+20 review process, discussions on artificial intelligence (AI) have highlighted the need for the digital revolution to serve people. UNESCO has repeatedly emphasized that the Information Society must be “people-centered.” This is especially relevant when, as UNESCO states, “from algorithmic biases to surveillance, from the erosion of privacy to the deepening of digital divides, the risks of technological development without ethical safeguards threaten to undermine human rights and global equity.”

Today, we have tools that provide the basis for promoting human rights-based AI, including:

  • The human rights due diligence standards, by which governments, companies, academia, and civil society organizations must guide the AI lifecycle, anticipate risks, and document decisions.

Among the structural risks of AI analyzed at the WSIS+20 High-Level Event were algorithmic bias, mass surveillance, erosion of privacy, and the widening of digital divides—developments that give rise to real or perceived threats that affect public trust in digital technologies, especially AI.

As for governance and concrete proposals, the following were highlighted:

  • The opportunities created by adopting ambitious and normative instruments, even when non-binding.
  • The urgency of establishing anticipatory, not merely reactive, governance for digital technologies.
  • The development of comprehensive national AI strategies should include elements such as energy access, connectivity, data infrastructure, and human talent availability.
  • Raising visibility for “small and beautiful models” in which AI, localized and task-oriented, can leverage local resources more intensively. Indeed, the concept of advancing toward “regenerative AI” was highlighted through the inclusion of multiple forms of local and ancestral knowledge.
  • The promotion of models like the “AI benchmark” developed by Women at the Table to evaluate language models based on international human rights standards.

Aligned with the Global Digital Compact, the event also called on standards organizations (such as ISO and IEEE) to incorporate human rights principles into the design of AI standards.

Reviewing the working agenda of the WSIS+20 High-Level Event, we can say that—at least in its environment and scope—the people-centered and human rights-based approach to the challenges of the digital age remains a cornerstone of the debates.

This becomes even more important as, in the absence of internationally shared AI governance, WSIS and its related processes, such as the IGF, have become essential frameworks for a collaborative digital governance that is still in the making.