Dennis Redeker at UN Internet Governance Forum 2025

ZeMKI member Dr. Dennis Redeker of the “Platform Governance, Media and Technology” Lab attended the United Nation’s Internet Governance Forum 2025 in Lillestrøm, Norway and presented research results and other outputs from research conducted at ZeMKI.

Among other activities, Dennis gave two talks and (co-)organized three sessions on the program of the annual UN conference. One presentation was part of a REMIT session on the program of the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet) Annual Symposium. Here Dennis presented research results from a project with Dr. Mariëlle Wijermars and Dr. Nicola Palladino on discourse coalitions found across Internet, platform and AI governance “digital bills of rights” (1992-2023). This work is part of REMIT project research located at ZeMKI that focuses on normative construction of technology governance.

The other talk, with Mariëlle Wijermars and – DMS student and ZeMKI student assistant – Kiho Oshima, served as a launch event of a newly revised and updated version of the interactive database of the Digital Constitutionalism Network. This database is based on a dataset produced by members of the network and funded by a variety of third-party and Bremen state-funded projects over the past four years. The dataset allows a variety of stakeholders in digital governance processes to access 321 hand-coded laws, declarations and recommendations on digital governance principles and compare them for their purposes. For instance, IT for Change, an India-based NGO used the previous version of the database for their annual “School of Digital Justice” trainings.

This year’s 20^th Internet Governance Forum attracted several thousand participants from around the globe. They represented national governments, parliaments and court, academia, NGOs and other civil society groups, small and large companies, standard-setting organizations and technical communities, the EU, as well as a large number of international organizations. Hot topics on the agenda were the negotiations around the World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS) + 20 (years) review, the implementation of the UN’s Global Digital Compact (agreed in 2024), the global governance of data and AI, and human rights-based and children-protecting governance of platforms and digital services. Notably, TikTok sent a delegation to the IGF for the first time, and Hollywood actor and producer Joseph Gordon-Levitt spoke on AI and creative industries.