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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.

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 presents the concluding part of the book and analyzes new global governance ideologies and scopes in the Internet-enabled world. It also discusses the challenges of nation-states in securing cyberspace, revisits the concept of multistakeholderism in Internet politics, and briefly emphasizes the Access to Knowledge element along with some important concepts of the preceding chapters. The chapter concludes with a note on cyber-libertarianism, and states that the requirement of future frameworks is inevitable in securing the Internet and its governance.

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 book has argued that the real cyber war is a competition among different political economies of the information society. It has shown how discourses of “internet freedom” serve to legitimize a particular political economy of globalism and how the increasingly vocal call for information sovereignty serves a legitimating function for state efforts to govern highly complex societies in a world wired for globally instantaneous communications. By emphasizing four lines of conceptual inquiry—history, social totality, moral philosophy, and praxis—a political-economy framework places the internet-freedom movement in the broader geopolitical and economic context within which strategic actors are competing for resources and power. The book has also examined the various economic and political interests at stake in debates over internet governance by focusing on Google's efforts to dominate each of the four distinct aspects of the information economy, the economics of internet connectivity, and the myth of multistakeholderism. In closing, the book revisits the idea that data is the new oil.

The final chapter summarizes the ideas of Four Internets. The Internet needs to remain connected, while its governance should allow different ideologies to flourish simultaneously, without imposing their view on the rest. Governance should pursue common interests while respecting cultural diversity. The prominent role of the United States remains an issue, although it has historically been a good steward of the infrastructure, and probably better than any alternative, including the multilateral structures promoted by nations like China and Russia. Governance is currently multistakeholder and ad hoc, but informal, emergent arrangements are probably better and more flexible than something neater and designed. Innovation and network effects need to be fostered, but policymakers will, on occasion, have to intervene against (perceived) negative externalities. New Internets will emerge over time; a COVID-19 Internet is imagined and described, for example. New technologies, such as quantum computing, will create new stresses, requiring a constant focus on resilience.

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.