Internet Governance

Internet governance refers to issues surrounding attempts to develop an international regulatory regime for the Internet. In recent years, the foundations of such a regime have been laid, centered mainly, but not exclusively, on a body known as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN was established in 1998 to take over most of the functions previously held by the U.S. Department of Commerce, though the United States still holds overall control of the important technical aspects of the Internet—a point of some controversy for a bloc of nations seeking to exert greater intergovernmental influence.

It is often stated that the Internet cannot be regulated. But Internet governance scholars argue that there are powerful points of control and influence over what appears to be a decentralized communication medium. Like all forms of communication, the Internet relies on common technical standards. Chief among these is a way of handling flows of data called Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP. For TCP/IP to function properly, there must exist some form of managing the allocation of IP addresses and the resources to which they point, in particular the process by which the obscure numerical addresses of computers, such as http://212.187.244.16, are translated into identifiable domain names, such as http://www.whitehouse.gov. This set of functions—known as the [Page 485]Domain Name System (DNS) has been described as the root of the global Internet. For a Web site of any kind to be visible, it must be entered into the DNS. Without it, the Internet as we know it would cease to function.

When the Internet started to diffuse during the 1990s, a diverse alliance of interests and institutions—including multinational corporations, the U.S. government, the European Union (EU), the International Telecommunication Union, the World Trade Organization (WTO), various nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and a technical engineering body known as the Internet Society—became embroiled in a struggle to shape the emerging network. The result was a fragile compromise: the creation of an industry self-governance regime based on ICANN's control of the DNS.

However, since the early 2000s, the role and influence of the United Nations (UN) has become increasingly central to the future development of Internet governance. During the mid-2000s, a debate arose about the involvement of UN member governments either in the established Governmental Advisory Committee of ICANN, or a new mechanism. Attempts to make more use of the DNS to control the Internet have been promulgated by a bloc of non-Western governments, including China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. The EU also favors greater political involvement, principally as a means of countering what it sees as U.S. dominance of an important economic resource. This controversy plagued the UN's World Summit on the Information Society, held in two stages between 2003 and 2005.

Internet governance is of broad significance for two reasons. First, it demonstrates that even in a policy area where the constraints on regulation are severe, it is still possible for a combination of national governments, international organizations, private companies, and civil society NGOs to exert leverage. Second, ICANN has been willing at times to experiment with democratic mechanisms that acknowledge the growing importance of citizens and global civil society in international relations. This conception suffered a severe setback in 2000 when the first (and only) ICANN “global election” descended into chaos, but it remains a powerful normative perspective that unites many progressive NGOs.

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