auIGF 2013 (Australian Internet Governance Forum) — In-Depth Report: Minutes Digest & 3-Line Summary

The 3-Line Summary

1. The second auIGF met at the Park Hyatt in Melbourne on 16–17 October 2013, drawing 280 participants (auDA's blog said over 300) from Australia and abroad.
2. auDA CEO Chris Disspain opened with a 'call to arms' — warning that global conflict over Internet governance was nearing a crisis point — and ICANN board chair Dr Steve Crocker, one of the Internet's founding fathers, gave the keynote.
3. Months after the WCIT-12 breakdown, the forum brought the global fight between intergovernmental control and the multistakeholder model home to Australia — a fight that continues through today's WSIS+20 debates.

Welcome — this is the Japan IGF Support Organization. This in-depth report on auIGF 2013 (Australian Internet Governance Forum) 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)

(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. A 'Call to Arms' — The Opening Address on a Governance Crisis

Sessions: Opening session (16 October, auDA CEO Chris Disspain)

"The struggle between those supporters of the current multi-stakeholder system of Internet governance and those that would seek more centralised control has been ongoing. The Internet's informal support frameworks, built on co-operation and trust, have been potentially weakened."
— Chris Disspain (CEO, auDA; ICANN Board member) [2]

"We need people now to actively join the global effort to ensure the Internet remains open and interoperable. We need to coalesce to promote the concept that decisions about Internet governance must be made within the multi-stakeholder model."
— Chris Disspain (CEO, auDA; ICANN Board member) [2]

• The core message: global conflict over how the Internet should be governed was nearing a crisis point, and the community had to unite to preserve an open, stable Internet [2]
• Disspain — then also an ICANN board member and UN IGF MAG member — explicitly warned that government-centric bodies like the ITU were 'desperate to fill a vacuum' of orphan policy issues [2]

2. Keynote by Steve Crocker — From ARPANET to ICANN

Sessions: Keynote address (Dr Stephen D. Crocker, Chair of the ICANN Board)

• One of the Internet's founding fathers — who helped create the ARPANET protocols as a UCLA graduate student and originated the RFC series — keynoted Australia's national forum [4][2][5]
• As ICANN board chair at a time when IANA oversight and the new gTLD expansion were global flashpoints, Crocker spoke from the engine room of names-and-numbers governance [4][2][5]
• In the same period auDA joined other ccTLD managers in pledging at least USD 100,000 a year to fund the global IGF, pairing domestic dialogue with support for the global infrastructure [4][2][5]

3. Four Main Themes — Law, Borders, Children's Rights and New gTLDs

Sessions: Panels and workshops (16–17 October)

• 'Legal frameworks and the Internet: a recipe for failure?' confronted the limits of regulating a global network with national law [3][5]
• 'Children and the Internet — rights and protections' prefigured Australia's Children's eSafety Commissioner, created in 2015 [3][5]
• A panel asked whether ICANN's new gTLD rollout (from 2013) meant 'consumer choice or consumer constraint' — the .au registry debating the merits of its own industry's expansion [3][5]
• Video of the 'WHOIS and data openness in the .au domain space' workshop survives in the official archive [3][5]

4. The auIGF Ambassadors — Piping Domestic Debate into the Global IGF

Sessions: Ambassador-led sessions and side events

• This year introduced publicly recruited 'auIGF Ambassadors' to lead discussions — a structure that shaped every later edition [3][5]
• Ambassador Dr John Selby carried the baton straight to the global IGF in Bali (October 2013), speaking on cybersecurity — the domestic-to-global relay in action [3][5]
• A 'Girls into IT' side event planted the seed for the gender-and-Internet and girls-into-STEM sessions of later years [3][5]

Three-Minute Short Talk — Your Questions Answered

Q. What did auIGF 2013 actually decide?

A. Nothing binding — that's by design. But auDA's CEO issued a 'call to arms' for the open Internet, and the new Ambassadors scheme began carrying Australian debates into the global IGF. This was the year the national forum became a feeder into global policy.

Q. Who is Steve Crocker and why did his keynote matter?

A. He wrote the first RFC in 1969 — the founding document format of Internet standards — and chaired ICANN's board at the time. One of the Internet's founding fathers keynoting a national forum signalled how seriously the auIGF was taken.

Q. Why should I care today?

A. The 2013 fault line — intergovernmental control versus the multistakeholder model — is the same one running through the WSIS+20 review now. National IGFs as local qualifiers for that global contest started taking shape in years like this.

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

Australia 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 2013 meeting are the foundation of the "next rules" for the phones, social platforms and AI services you use every day.

Sources & References

1. Australian Internet Governance Forum — DiploFoundation (accessed 2026-07-11)
2. Internet Community “Call to Arms” Launches auIGF（2013-10-17） — auDA公式ブログ（Wayback Machineアーカイブ） (accessed 2026-07-11)
3. auDA launches 2013 Australian Internet Governance Forum and “auIGF Ambassadors” initiative（2013-05-06） — auIGF / auDA（Wayback Machineアーカイブ） (accessed 2026-07-11)
4. auDA pleased to announce Dr. Steve Crocker as 2013 auIGF Keynote Speaker（2013-09-12） — auIGF / auDA（Wayback Machineアーカイブ） (accessed 2026-07-11)
5. auIGF Photo and Video Archive 2013 — auIGF / auDA（Wayback Machineアーカイブ） (accessed 2026-07-11)
6. About the Australian Internet Governance Forum（2015年版公式サイト。280人と記載） — auIGF / auDA（Wayback Machineアーカイブ） (accessed 2026-07-11)

Quotes are translated or condensed from the records listed above. Bracketed numbers [n] refer to the source list.

Related links

• IGF official (NRI list): https://www.intgovforum.org/en/content/national-and-regional-igf-initiatives
• Japan IGF: https://japanigf.jp/
• Yuki Nakazawa's blog: https://nkzw.jp/category/igf/

Revision History

Rev. 1 — published 26 June 2013, 11:00 (Article published)

Rev. 2 — updated 16 July 2026, 20:09 (Fully revised into the in-depth edition: added the 3-line summary, minutes digest, short talk, source list and diagrams (all quotes verified against the listed sources))

— 中澤祐樹