NL IGF Programme at the ECP Annual Congress 2019 — In-Depth Report: Minutes Digest & 3-Line Summary

The 3-Line Summary

On 14 November 2019, the NL IGF programme ran inside the 22nd ECP Annual Congress at the Fokker Terminal in The Hague, which drew around 800 visitors — an integration into a larger event rather than a stand-alone forum.
Under the theme 'The Future of the Information Society', the IGF-related pillars were Solid (returning control of personal data), philosopher Peter-Paul Verbeek's 'guidance ethics', and public values on the Internet.
The sessions' output fed into the Dutch input for the IGF in Berlin later that month ('One World. One Net. One Vision.'), testing how a national IGF can reach a wider audience.

Welcome — this is the Japan IGF Support Organization. This in-depth report on NL IGF Programme at the ECP Annual Congress 2019 draws on official outputs, session records and on-site reporting. In a hurry? The three lines above and the diagrams carry the gist.

Conference at a Glance (from official records)

Item	Detail
Official name	NL IGF Programme at the ECP Annual Congress 2019
Dates	14 November 2019
Venue	Fokker Terminal, The Hague
Theme	The Future of the Information Society
Participants	Around 800 visitors at the congress as a whole (22nd edition)
Host	Jointly staged by NL IGF (Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy, SIDN, ECP) and ECP, with NL IGF as a partner of the ECP Annual Congress

(See the source list at the end of this article.)

Discussion Digest — from the Session Records

Key exchanges extracted from session records and transcripts.

1. The Integration Experiment — Taking the National IGF to an 800-Person Congress

Sessions: NL IGF programme within the 22nd ECP Annual Congress

NL IGF explained the merger officially as a way 'to bring Internet governance topics and the IGF to the attention of a larger audience' instead of holding a separate event [1][2]
With some 800 visitors, the congress exposed Internet-governance topics to several times the audience of the stand-alone events (typically around 100) [1][2]

2. Solid — Handing Control of Personal Data Back to Users

Sessions: Session on Solid (Social Linked Data)

Solid, initiated by Tim Berners-Lee, was presented as 'a correction to the current Internet', with its components and a live Dutch use case explained [1]
As a concrete technical counter to platform data concentration, it brought the data-sovereignty debate down to implementation level [1]

3. Digitalisation, Ethics and Public Values — The 'Guidance Ethics' Approach

Sessions: Sessions 'Digitalisation and ethics' and 'Public values and the Internet'

The 'guidance ethics' approach — developed in an ECP working group from philosopher Peter-Paul Verbeek's thinking on how technology and society can engage each other around values — was presented [1][2]
The public-values session asked how Internet companies can respect values like privacy, grounding the question in Internet infrastructure and governance; outcomes were folded into the Dutch input for IGF Berlin [1][2]

Three-Minute Short Talk — Your Questions Answered

Q. What did the meeting decide?

A. Nothing binding — NL IGF sessions ran inside ECP's annual congress, and their output became the Dutch input for the UN IGF in Berlin at the month's end.

Q. Why drop the stand-alone event?

A. Reach. Embedding the sessions in an 800-visitor congress put Internet governance in front of a far larger audience than the usual 100-person event.

Q. Why does it matter?

A. Piggybacking a national IGF on a major conference to widen its audience is an operational trick any national IGF community can borrow.

What Is Netherlands IGF? (for first-time readers)

Netherlands IGF is a National or Regional IGF Initiative (NRI), aligning local internet governance discussion with global IGF principles.

Why It Matters to You

What was discussed here becomes the baseline for national digital policy, platform rules and AI regulation worldwide within a few years. The principles confirmed at the 2019 meeting are the foundation of the "next rules" for the phones, social platforms and AI services you use every day.