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This chapter presents a typology of various models of governance forms that impinge, or are assumed to impinge, on the Internet. Five such models are analysed. One model is based on a view of the Internet as a self-governing realm of individual liberty beyond the reach of government control. Another model takes as its point of departure the inherently cross-border nature of the Internet and sees transnational, quasi-private cooperatives or international organizations based on treaty arrangements as the most relevant institutions for Internet governance. A third model is based on the notion that many regulatory decisions are made by the code and architecture of the Internet. A fourth model is premised on the idea that as the Internet grows in importance fundamental regulatory decisions will be made by national governments through legal regulation. Finally, there is the model of market regulation and economics which assumes that market forces drive the fundamental decisions about the nature of the Internet. The chapter argues that no single one of these models captures all of the facets of Internet governance or offers the solution to all of the problems raised by Internet governance. It concludes with a discussion of the issue of network neutrality and attempts thereby to cast light on the future utility of the models concerned.

This chapter explores in detail the Internet service evolution in India starting with the erstwhile monopoly provisioning by the government operator. It explains the restrictions on Internet service provisioning and the development in the broadband infrastructure in the country and the associated policy initiatives. The Basic Telecom Operators (BTOs) had an edge over the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in providing bundled Internet services. As per the ISP guidelines, the Internet Telephony Service Providers (ITSPs) were not allowed to deploy media gateways in India due to restricted internet telephony. In India, the National Internet Exchange of India resolves domain name disputes involving the in domain. Restrictions in the form of network neutrality may prevent deployment and further adoption of wireless broadband and mobile Internet. Internet access through the broadband network is still very limited in India. It is hoped that Internet services in India will pick up in the coming years.

The Internet has progressively supplanted older radio, telephone, and cable television networks as a primary communication infrastructure. Indeed, the Internet has become a single communication infrastructure able to absorb a multitude of media streams that used to require specialized networks. There is no definitive approach on how best to use the Internet to leverage broad-based innovation and find new ways to communicate over a ubiquitous broadband infrastructure. Instead, trade-offs arise between the interests of today’s infrastructure owners, content creators, application providers, and users. This chapter examines such trade-offs and their potential impact on the evolution of the communication infrastructure as well as the activities it will support. It discusses the debate over Network Neutrality, technical factors and trade-offs driving the evolution of broadband networks, broadband wireless access, municipally-owned fiber networks, and user-owned access.

Network neutrality is an Internet policy issue that is prominently situated in policy discussions and media coverage. The basic question of network neutrality is whether Internet service providers should be legally prohibited from discriminating against, i.e. blocking or throttling back, specific Internet traffic. This differential treatment of traffic could be based on specific content, applications, protocols, classes of traffic such as video, or some characteristic of the user transmitting or accessing the traffic. This chapter provides some examples of network discrimination in the twenty-first century; explains the arguments for and against net neutrality regulation; and describes the history and status of this contentious Internet policy topic in global context.

Chapter 2 provides a theoretical discussion of money, code, and space to foreground the emergence of Bitcoin as a radical response to existing economic structures. Using the history of central banking and software production, Bitcoin is compared to traditional modes of centralised governance to outline some of the political context of algorithmic decentralisation. In doing so, the binary of centralised and decentralised is rendered reductive and thus impotent for describing digital networks because of the inescapable complexity inherent within them. Instead, the concept of obligatory passage points is adapted into a framework for understanding (de)centralisation in algorithmic networks. This provides an understanding of money/code/space that encapsulates the cultural and economic messiness of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology that can be used for bringing places of power to the forefront of related academic scholarship.