Private sector and interests --- Muna, this is an interesting observation: private sector always put profit before people best interest. This is, I guess, true in most cases.

In some cases, people interest actually match with their own: e.g. greater users' safety increases trust in online services and digital devices; or, reduced state-driven attacks provide greater incentives for digitalisation and thus fuels business models of IT industry. In some, obviously, this is the opposite: much of digital economy depends on re-selling personal data, which goes against privacy.

Is it, then, more about finding ways to drive users' demand towards people's best interest (say security, privacy,etc) which will shape the open market?

After all, being clear what the interests of businesses is certainly helps. Interests of states or civil society are not straightforward either: many (if not most?) governments look for winning the next elections; much of the civil society is driven by the priorities of their donors (directly or indirectly).

Multistakeholder approach, therefore, needs to take into account those interests, and discuss different views of what a public interest is (and certain values on national or international level), and then try to tune everyone in sync with different measures. It may be more possible to do on a national level, than on the international?

Source author: Vladimir Radunovic vladar@diplomacy.edu