# IGF 2026 WS #172 Continuity and Convergence: Internet and AI Governance ## Description This panel brings a distinct perspective to IGF: young people from different countries, cultures, and backgrounds, unaffiliated with governments or big tech. That independence gives the panel a critical vantage point and opens space for non-partisan discussion. Every argument now made about AI governance : that it moves too fast to regulate or that state and corporate power will inevitably capture, has already been made about internet governance. This session does not call for a return to some imagined golden age of internet governance; we don't believe one existed. Bangladesh, India, Nicaragua and Uganda all repeated the same pattern of disconnecting their people from the worldwide internet, showing that states still default to switching infrastructure off rather than negotiating over it. The alternative is plurality. Built the way Africa is already building it. Kenya's Jacaranda Health runs a large language model for maternal health in Swahili. Uganda's Sunbird AI develops language AI for communities too small for global models to serve. Lelapa AI designs small language models for the power, compute, and connectivity constraints most of the continent actually faces. On connectivity, Starlink now faces real competition in Africa from Eutelsat OneWeb and direct-to-phone providers, meaning no single government can bargain with a single company to control access. **This is the model this session argues for:** a thousand AI companies instead of two or three global labs, publicly owned where possible, alongside community-owned tech resources and citizens' tech collectives; hardened Bluetooth mesh and offline-first tools instead of waiting for permission to reconnect; and Aaron Swartz-style open infrastructure for AI, treating datasets and models as shared commons the way Africa's language-model builders already do. Technologists, legal scholars, and community organizers will debate — using Kenya and Uganda as live case studies — where this plurality strategy works, and where it doesn't. ## Policy Question(s) A. Under what conditions can a plural ecosystem of independent AI companies and community-owned network solutions contribute to an inclusive and democratic governance? B. How can democratic decisions be made about the internet and AI infrastructure? C. How can the lessons from a plural, democratic internet governance model be transferred to governance of AI, its datasets, models, and connectivity layer, so that they can be built as a public common good worth to be sustained and governed? ## Expected Outcomes The session is designed to produce three tangible outputs. First, a published report synthesising the discussion as an openly licensed brief (deposited on Zenodo). This document would document current best practices in plural, community- and publicly-owned AI, drawn from the Kenya and Uganda case studies. Second, the beginnings of a standing network (working group) of actors including technologists, legal scholars, community organisers, and builders who share an interest in more plural and inclusive AI governance and are willing to continue the exchange beyond the session. Third, a shared map of future solutions and ways forward to build a democratic and inclusive AI governance. To the end, we will publish a roadmap of consortium development along with our report. ## Format Roundtable **Duration (minutes):** 90 **Format description:** The session brings together youth and established practitioners across disciplines and regions, speaking independently. A roundtable seats everyone at equal standing rather than arranging speakers in front of an audience, which is what makes real discussion possible between technologists, legal scholars and organisers, and what allows younger participants to intervene rather than listen. It also lets onsite and online discussants share one table. Ninety minutes carries the session from shared context to exchange. Ten minutes open with a team explainer and a short film on the Kenyan and Ugandan builders. Twenty minutes of provocations follow. Participants then spend twenty minutes mapping cases they know onto a shared works / does not work board. The closing forty minutes are open discussion, the final ten reserved for turning that board into an openly licensed brief, a roadmap, and a working group. ## Hybrid Format **Hybrid Format:** The session is a roundtable, a format that invites exchange rather than broadcast and travels well across the hybrid divide. We will seat online and onsite discussants around one shared table, prompt the discussion asking for opinions and experiences and sequence the conversation so contributions visibly alternate between room and screen. A dedicated online moderator, separate from the onsite chair, has equal authority to bring in remote participants, surface their questions, and hold speaking time, so online voices are never an afterthought. Alongside the IGF-provided link, we will run Jitsi — open-source, low-bandwidth, and self-hostable — as our complementary platform, a deliberate choice mirroring the session's commitment to open, commons-based infrastructure over proprietary tools. We will also use a live shared document and a real-time poll so every participant can mark where plurality "works / does not work," feeding the discussion directly into the report. Captioning runs throughout. ## Organizers **Organizer 1:** Pedro dos Santos Maia, Skema Business School **Organizer 2:** Chandrima Ganguly, DARS Worldwide **Organizer 3:** Emaan Malik, National Commission for Human Rights (NCHR) **Organizer 4:** Meem Arafat Manab, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid ## Speakers **Speaker 1:** Chandrima Ganguly, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group **Speaker 2:** Emaan Malik, Intergovernmental Organization, Asia-Pacific Group **Speaker 3:** Meem Arafat Manab, Technical Community, Western European and Others Group (WEOG) ## Moderator Pedro dos Santos Maia, Civil Society, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC) ## Online Moderator Pedro dos Santos Maia, Civil Society, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC) ## Rapporteur Pedro dos Santos Maia, Civil Society, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC) ## Participant Benefits What will participants gain from attending this session? ## SDGs 9. Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure 16. Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions