Wolfgang Kleinwächter

Wolfgang Kleinwächter is a Professor Emeritus from the University of Aarhus where he was teaching a master course on Internet Policy and Regulation from 1997 – 2015. He was a Director on the ICANN Board (2013 – 2015) and a Special Ambassador of the NETMundial Initiative (2014 – 2016).

He is active in the field of transborder data flow and Internet Governance since the 1980s. He was involved in the making of ICANN and has participated – in various capacities – in more than 50 ICANN meetings. He served six years in the NomCom (2009/2010 as its chair) and two years in the GNSO Council (2011 – 2013), elected by the Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group (NCSG) where he is a member of the NCUC. He is also founder and chair of the ICANN Studienkreis, a high level multistakeholder network of experts and chair the Board of Medienstadt Leipzig e.V., a recognized At Large Structure under the ICANN Bylaws.

He was also involved from the very beginning in the preparation of the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Since 2002 he was member of the WSIS Civil Society Bureau, he co-chaired the Internet Governance Caucus (IGC) and was appointed (in 2004) by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as a member of the UN Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG). Between 2006 and 2010 he served as Special Adviser to the Chair of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), Nitin Desai. Until 2014 he chaired the IGF Dynamic Coalition on the Internet of Things (DC IOT).

In the ITU he joined the German governmental delegation to the World Conference on International Telecommunication (WCIT) in Dubai in 2012 and served in the Informal Expert Group of the ITU World Telecommunication Policy Forum (WTPF) in 2013.

He is a co-founder of the European Dialogue on Internet Governance (EURODIG), the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GIGANET) and the Summer School on Internet Governance (SSIG). In the domain name industry he served in the Advisory Board of the dotmobi Registry, became an International Adviser to CNNIC, the Chinese ccTLD Registry and is a special Internet Governance adviser for DENIC, the German ccTLD Registry.

In the academic world he was more than 20 years a council member of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) and served as the president of the IAMCR Law Section between 1988 and 1998. He was a member of the Program Committee for INET 2002 in Washington D.C. and a Key-Note Speaker, Panelist, Moderator and Rapporteur of numerous international conferences.

His research work includes more than 100 international publications, including 7 books. From 2011 to 2016 he was the editor of the publication series MIND (Multistakeholder Internet Dialogue). He also served as member of several advisory boards of scientific journals, including Transnational Data and Communication Report, Computer Law and Security Report, The Journal of Media Law and Practice, Gazette and the Journal for Virtual Reality. His recent publications include “Sharing Decision Making in Internet Governance”, in William Drake, The Working Group on Internet Governance: 10th Anniversary Reflections, New York 2015, “Internet Fragmentation: An Overview”, World Economic Forum Davos 2016 (with Vint Cerf and William Drake) and “Internet Governance Outlook 2017: Nationalistic Hierarchies vs. Multistakeholder Networks”, CircleID, 2017.