Representatives from 15 countries participated in the 5th Moldova Internet Governance Forum (MIGF 2025)
This year's MIGF was held in a hybrid format on April 15-16 and involved both offline participants in Chisinau and online audience. According to the organizers, thanks to multimedia broadcasting, the Forum gathered more than 32 thousand unique viewers, confirming the public demand for dialogue on the future of the digital environment. MIGF was joined by representatives of government agencies, business, technical community, academia, as well as international partners. During 2 days, the Forum gathered at its sessions and parallel events about 40 leading experts from Moldova and other countries, including Belgium, Germany, USA, Ukraine, Georgia, Canada, Singapore, India, and Central Asia. The Forum provided an inclusive platform to discuss key challenges - from digital trust and sustainable development to cybersecurity, responsible innovation and protection of digital rights of users. Special attention was paid to how countries and regions can participate in shaping global rules and approaches in the digital sphere - including through initiatives such as WSIS+20 and the Global Digital Compact. The opening session featured presentations from national and international partners, with live updates from Geneva, Brussels and New York. Veni Markovski, ICANN interim head of the Government and IGO Engagement team, noted that participation in global initiatives allows countries and regions not only to adapt to global trends, but also to contribute to the formation of a sustainable, inclusive and secure digital environment. According to him, national events, such as Moldova IGF, play a key role in ensuring multilateral dialog and exchange of experience, contributing to the development of harmonized approaches to digital policy, taking into account local specificities and global challenges. Director of the National Regulatory Agency for Electronic Communications and Information Technology (ANRCETI) Sergiu Gaibu reiterated the commitment of the national regulator to actively participate in the formation of the state digital policy, which ensures an open, secure Internet that takes into account the needs of all users and meets both international trends and national priorities of digital development. One of the significant events of the Forum was Universal Acceptance Day, which was held with the support of ICANN and UNESCO, and was dedicated to the issues of multilingualism and accessibility of digital content in the global Internet space. Web developers and programmers from the Center for Information Technologies in Finance, the e-Governance Agency, commercial companies, and students from the Technical University of Moldova received practical training on developing applications and systems that meet the principles of universal acceptance. “The Forum demonstrated that digital development requires not only technological solutions, but also sustainable models of cooperation between the state, business, experts, society and international actors. Such a dialog allows taking into account different interests and adapting the digital agenda to the real needs of users,” said MIGF coordinator Alexei Marciuc. According to him, the results of the Forum will be formalized in the form of key conclusions and recommendations, becoming a contribution to the global process of discussing the priorities of digital development. MIGF was organized by Comunitatea Internet Association with the support of government agencies, international and national partners, including UN IGF, Internet Society, ICANN, RIPE NCC, TikTok, SecDev Foundation, ARTICLE 19, Access Now, ANRCETI, and STISC. //18.04.2025 - InfoMarket.
