The cancellation of RightsCon 2026 is a stark reminder that when opportunities for civic engagement are neutralized, so are stakeholders’ voices. In this case, civil society was denied the ability to meet in person in Lusaka last week to share ideas and opportunities for how to address some of the most urgent digital challenges of our time.
Personally, I was excited to connect with advocates from Zambia and broader Sub-Saharan Africa, home to some of the most dedicated and interesting digital rights work happening today. Ultimately, they are the ones who will pay the biggest price for the cancellation. For many, RightsCon was a lifeline, offering a way to connect with expertise, access critical funding opportunities, and build partnerships with others working to make sure people everywhere are protected online. Beyond the opportunities lost, the time and money they spent preparing for the event cannot be recovered.
But the cancellation’s impact goes far beyond any single event or region. For anyone who cares about the multistakeholder model of Internet governance, it should be a wake-up call. Because this is not about a conference. It’s about whether or not the voices of those most deeply impacted by the Internet will continue to help shape its future. Or if groups that have been part of the multistakeholder model of Internet governance from the outset can be sidelined over time.
Just five months ago, governments came together at the United Nations to reaffirm the multistakeholder model. Even as many of us celebrated the significant win—which the Internet technical community spent months fighting for—it was too close a call. And it was clear that stakeholders would have to play an active role in how the WSIS+20 framework is implemented, or risk becoming Internet governance bystanders.
From the beginning, the Internet’s architects understood that no one group should be responsible for its governance, and that it would take expertise from across sectors to make it a force for good. Within this ecosystem, civil society plays the crucial role of making sure that decision-makers take the societal impacts of the Internet into account. The digital rights community and the technical community both play a critical, at times overlapping, role in civil society. In defending one another’s right to convene, we aren’t defending an individual group or point of view; we are defending the very model that has created and sustained the Internet as we know it.
Thankfully, the resilience and collective strength of the global Internet community is stronger than any one setback. And the opportunity to create venues, online and off, for stakeholders to come together to solve technical challenges, is still ours to create and take part in. To make sure that continues to be the case, the same clarity of purpose that helped the Internet community stand up for the multistakeholder model so forcefully at the United Nations in December is needed between negotiations, too. That means recognizing that when one group is silenced, we must respond with unrelenting defense of the ecosystem as a whole. Or risk being the next to be silenced.
Image © Lighton Phiri, CC BY 2.0
