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This chapter looks at provocations for the future of Internet governance. Policy entanglements with previously distinct spheres—consumer safety, systems of democracy, cryptocurrency, and environmental protection—expand the scope of global Internet governance. Power relations in the multistakeholder governance regime shift as new companies, new standards regimes, and new tensions arise between bordered government regulatory responses and a global cyber-physical architecture. Meanwhile, the rising stakes of digital security, such as to consumer safety and national security, challenge some venerable norms of Internet governance. Lastly, notions of a free and open Internet, still vitally important, move toward notions of security, stability, and reliability.

This chapter discusses the concept of internet governance, which involves the design and administration of the technologies necessary to keep the Internet operational and the enactment of substantive policy around these technologies. It suggests five features of global Internet governance that will serve as a conceptual framework for this book: (i) how arrangements of technical architecture are arrangements of power; (ii) the propensity to use Internet governance technologies as a proxy for content control; (iii) the privatization of Internet governance; (iv) how Internet points of control serve as sites of global conflict over competing values; and (v) the tension between local geopolitics and collective action problems in Internet globalization. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter addresses the issues of Internet Protocol (IP) design space, allocation, and control as key Internet governance concerns. It finds that the Internet governance concern involves issues of international control, natural jurisdiction, and global access to knowledge. The chapter examines the development of the Internet address space from the 1960s along with the development of the IPv6 address space. It examines these factors to predict the time when Internet address space is exhausted by technical professionals engaged in designing and developing the Internet and the emergence of the new IPv6 address structure. The chapter also provides instances of arguments against predictions of Internet address scarcity, and describes governance problems involving international and non-governmental conflicts for controlling these Internet addresses to address the issue of scarce IP addresses.

This chapter, which investigates why the choices about institutional delegation for Internet governance had important implications for the evolution of the Internet and for the creation of new global resources for networking, addresses the accounts of United States market governance and Internet governance. It shows that the governance of the Internet is a function of the political economy of the United States. The full commercial significance of Internet emerged during the years 1993–2000. The chapter suggests that the issue of scarcity which determined Internet governance centered on domain names, the user-friendly placeholders for numerical IP addresses. The Internet traffic case reveals how classic distributional disputes tend to draw more direct intervention and control by governments.

This chapter focuses on the evolution of civil society participation in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) process and the rise of “multistakeholderism” as a new principle with the potential to inform more of information and communications technology (ICT) global governance. After discussing the role of the WSIS in fostering a new trilateral relationship among governments, private industry, and civil society and in promoting international diplomacy, the chapter looks at the Carlsbad Treaty of 1819, the debate over the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), the Global Information Infrastructure Initiative, and the Working Group on Internet Governance.

This chapter provides a brief introduction to Internet governance, examines how the Internet has proven to be a debatable source in international politics, and shows how this impacts international relations. It further elaborates on the terminology used in this book and also outlines major drivers of global Internet governance: Intellectual property protection, cybersecurity, content regulation, and critical Internet resources. Furthermore, the discussion continues with a short description of networks and states, the ways in which the Internet puts pressure on the nation-state, networked governance, sectors and institutions, and the important role of transnational policies. The chapter concludes with a content description of later parts and their subparts in the book.

This chapter explains the formation and politics of the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF), an important and innovative outcome of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), and, furthermore, discusses the involvement of transnational policy networks and the political bargaining in shaping the IGF’s processes and design. The relationship between the IGF, the Tunis Agenda, and The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) contribute to understanding the outcomes of the IGF. The chapter also examines the strengths and weaknesses of the IGF in global governance, and extends the discussion with an important concept, Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG), which acts as an assisting committee to the IGF. It explores several political agendas and forums for political transformation of global Internet governance, and also deeply analyzes the IGF.

This chapter examines how multistakeholder institutions reflect dominant political and/or economic interests, arguing that the discourse of multistakeholderism is used to legitimize arrangements benefiting powerful, established actors like the United States and its robust Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector. After a brief discussion of what is actually at stake in debates over internet governance, the chapter provides an overview of the origins and theory of the multistakeholder process. It then considers how seemingly participatory, inclusive, and consensus-driven decision-making structures provide legitimacy for existing political and economic interests by using three case studies: ICANN, the Internet Society (ISOC), and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It shows that, by incentivizing inclusion and consensus, multistakeholder processes risk stifling legitimate dissent from external actors who have no interest in lending legitimacy to the facade of an apolitical negotiation.

This chapter examines how internet technologies and related media have been affecting changes in how scholars, policymakers, and activists regard publics. It presents a case study that looks at how the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has been emerging as a focal point for mobilization around a particular “transnational frame” that addresses and engages a different order of internet governance issues than hitherto; namely it looks at a project to put human rights at the heart of internet design, access, and use, and to do so as a global public issue.

This chapter finds that better Internet governance frameworks are needed to address the issue of scarce Internet Protocol (IP) address resources. Professionals engaged in developing Internet standards developed IPv6 as the next-generation IP standard to expand the range of IP addresses. The chapter finds that IPv6 adoption has been unable to realize the potential expected from it by its designers, advocates, or government mandates. This is due to the decentralization of Internet adoption. The chapter also suggests that Internet governance frameworks need to emphasize centralizing IP address allocation to overcome the challenge of declining resources amid relentless expansion of the Internet across the globe.

This chapter analyses whether and on which legal basis the Internet can be considered as part of the common heritage of mankind and, from this perspective, what legal implications would ensue therefrom in relation to the governance of the Internet. Even if cyberspace is not a perfect commons, Internet governance through the contours of the common heritage of mankind concept is an innovative proposal that may be successfully added to the discussion, since the features of this notion seem to create a better legal framework for Internet governance than the present multi-stakeholder approach. This proposal provides one of the best legal frameworks available in international law to achieve the common management of global critical resources for the benefit of all.

This chapter introduces the Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet and Ten Internet Rights and Principles (IRP Coalition 2011, 2013). Under the leadership of the Internet Rights and Principles Coalition at the UN Internet Governance Forum, the IRPC Charter is the outcome of a cross-sector collaboration between civil society organizations, human rights experts, scholars, and representatives from the (inter-) governmental and private sector to provide an authoritative, human rights-based legal framework for decisions around internet design, access and use. Essential to this project’s success was an early decision to anchor the work in precursor civil society initiatives and international law. The coalition building strategy that underpins the Charter brought a range of actors together, face-to-face and online, in the spirit of web-enabled collabowriting based on “multistakeholder participation”. A commitment to forging alliances and cooperation across diverse sectors in order to ensure human-centered internet policymaking has been a key factor in the success of the IRPC Charter to articulate a viable framework for rights-based agenda-setting in a policymaking terrain dominated by powerful techno-commercial interests and competing political agendas.

Internet governance (IG) became a global issue after the Snowden revelations that highlighted the fact that there was mass spying by privately owned companies on behalf of the NSA. This chapter deals with the politics of IG, the ambivalent nature of India’s shifting commitments to the multistakeholder model, and the role played by civil society in Internet politics in India against the background of ICANN’s own history and contemporary status. The Indian government’s position on IG is complex given that it has adopted both a statist attitude towards its governance and considered the ITU as a natural governor of the Internet, along with a position that is supportive of multistakeholderism, although this ethic is not reflected in its facilitation of civil society involvements at a local level.

This chapter introduces some of the technical protocols that enable the Internet’s fundamental interoperability. It explains the institutional framework responsible for these protocols and some of the procedural traditions and organizational challenges that have accompanied the rise of new nongovernmental global institutions. It also addresses how protocols can have significant public policy implications and examines procedural routes to legitimacy for this privatization of governance.