Internet governance is the effort by governments, the private sector, civil society, and technical actors to develop and apply shared principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures that shape the evolution and use of the Internet. This article describes how the Internet was and is currently governed, some inherent controversies, and ongoing debates regarding how and why the Internet should or should not be governed in the future.
Background
No person, company, organization or government runs the Internet. It is a globally distributed network comprising many voluntarily interconnected autonomous networks. It operates without a central governing body with each constituent network setting and enforcing its own policies. Its governance is conducted by a decentralized and international multistakeholder network of interconnected autonomous groups drawing from civil society, the private sector, governments, the academic and research communities and national and international organizations. They work cooperatively from their respective roles to create shared policies and standards that maintain the Internet's global interoperability for the public good.
However, to help ensure interoperability, several key technical and policy aspects of the underlying core infrastructure and the principal namespaces are administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is headquartered in Los Angeles, California. ICANN oversees the assignment of globally unique identifiers on the Internet, including domain names, Internet protocol addresses, application port numbers in the transport protocols, and many other parameters. This seeks to create a globally unified namespace to ensure the global reach of the Internet. ICANN is governed by an international board of directors drawn from across the Internet's technical, business, academic, and other non-commercial communities.
There has been a long-held dispute over the management of the DNS root zone,Klein, Hans. (2004). "ICANN and Non-Territorial Sovereignty: Government Without the Nation State." Internet and Public Policy Project. Georgia Institute of Technology. whose final control fell under the supervision of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Considering that the U.S. Department of Commerce could unilaterally terminate the Affirmation of Commitments with ICANN, the authority of the DNS administration was likewise seen as revocable and derived from a single State, namely the United States. The involvement of NTIA started in 1998 and was supposed to be temporary, but it wasn't until April 2014 in an ICANN meeting held in Brazil, partly heated after Snowden revelations, that this situation changed resulting in an important shift of control transitioning administrative duties of the DNS root zones from NTIA to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) during a period that ended in September 2016.
The technical underpinning and standardization of the Internet's core protocols (IPv4 and IPv6) is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise.
On 23 November 1995, the United Nations-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), held in Tunis, established the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to open an ongoing, non-binding conversation among multiple stakeholders about the future of Internet governance. Since WSIS, the term "Internet governance" has been broadened beyond narrow technical concerns to include a wider range of Internet-related policy issues.DeNardis, Laura, The Emerging Field of Internet Governance (17 September 2010). Yale Information Society Project Working Paper Series.
In 2024, the OECD expanded policy resources on AI, including incident tracking and guidance for generative AI, to support multistakeholder internet governance debates.OECD AI Policy Observatory Portal
Definition The definition of Internet governance has been contested by differing groups across political and ideological lines.Malte Ziewitz/Christian Pentzold, "In search of internet governance: Performing order in digitally networked environments", New Media & Society 16 (2014): pp. 306-322. One of the main debates concerns certain actors' – such as national governments, corporate entities and civil society – participation in the Internet's governance, and their authority to play a role in it.
A working group established after a UN-initiated World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) proposed the following definition of Internet governance as part of its June 2005 report: Internet governance is the development and application by Governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet."Report of the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG)", June 2005, p. 4.
Law professor Yochai Benkler developed a conceptualization of Internet governance by the idea of three "layers" of governance:Yochai Benkler, "From Consumers to Users: Shifting the Deeper Structures of Regulation Towards Sustainable Commons and User Access" , 52 Fed. Comm. L.J. 561, (2000). Physical infrastructure layer (through which information travels) Code or logical layer (controls the infrastructure) Content layer (contains the information signaled through the network)
Professors Jovan Kurbalija and Laura DeNardis also offer comprehensive definitions to "Internet Governance". According to Kurbalija, the broad approach to Internet Governance goes "beyond Internet infrastructural aspects and address other legal, economic, developmental, and sociocultural issues";Jovan Kurbalija, "An Introduction to Internet Governance", 7 ed, DiploFoundation (2016). along similar lines, DeNardis argues that "Internet Governance generally refers to the policy and technical coordination issues related to the exchange of information over the Internet".Laura DeNardis, "The Emerging Field of Internet Governance" (17 September 2010), Yale Information Society Project Working Paper Series. One of the more policy-relevant questions today is exactly whether the regulatory responses are appropriate to police the content delivered through the Internet: it includes important rules for the improvement of Internet safety and for dealing with threats such as cyber-bullying, copyright infringement, data protection and other illegal or disruptive activities.On this, see e.g. Nicola Lucchi, "Internet Content Governance & Human Rights" 16 Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law Vol. 16, n. 4 (2014) 809-856.
Internet governance now constitutes a college-level field of study with many syllabi available.
History
The original ARPANET is one of the components which eventually evolved to become the Internet. As its name suggests the ARPANET was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency within the U.S. Department of Defense. During the development of ARPANET, a numbered series of Request for Comments (RFCs) memos documented technical decisions and methods of working as they evolved. The standards of today's Internet are still documented by RFCs.
Between 1984 and 1986 the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) created the NSFNET backbone, using TCP/IP, to connect their supercomputing facilities. NSFNET became a general-purpose research network, a hub to connect the supercomputing centers to each other and to the regional research and education networks that would in turn connect campus networks.NSFNET: A Partnership for High-Speed Networking, Final Report 19877-1995 , Karen D. Frazer, Merit Network, Inc., 1995 The combined networks became generally known as the Internet. By the end of 1989, Australia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the UK were connected to the Internet, which had grown to contain more than 160,000 hosts.
In 1990, the ARPANET was formally terminated. In 1991 the NSF began to relax its restrictions on commercial use on NSFNET and commercial network providers began to interconnect. The final restrictions on carrying commercial traffic ended on 30 April 1995, when the NSF ended its sponsorship of the NSFNET Backbone Service and the service ended."Retiring the NSFNET Backbone Service: Chronicling the End of an Era" , Susan R. Harris, PhD, and Elise Gerich, ConneXions, Vol. 10, No. 4, April 1996 Today almost all Internet infrastructure in the United States, and large portion in other countries, is provided and owned by the private sector. Traffic is exchanged between these networks, at major interconnection points, in accordance with established Internet standards and commercial agreements.
Governors
During 1979 the Internet Configuration Control Board was founded by DARPA to oversee the network's development. During 1984 it was renamed the Internet Advisory Board (IAB), and during 1986 it became the Internet Activities Board.: Charter of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), May 2000
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was formed during 1986 by the U.S. government to develop and promote Internet standards. It consisted initially of researchers, but by the end of the year participation was available to anyone, and its business was performed largely by email.
From the early days of the network until his death during 1998, Jon Postel oversaw address allocation and other Internet protocol numbering and assignments in his capacity as Director of the Computer Networks Division at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, under a contract from the Department of Defense. This function eventually became known as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and as it expanded to include management of the global Domain Name System (DNS) root servers, a small organization grew. Postel also served as RFC Editor.
Allocation of IP addresses was delegated to five regional Internet registries (RIRs): American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) for North America Réseaux IP Européens - Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) for Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) for Asia and the Pacific region Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry (LACNIC) for Latin America and the Caribbean region African Network Information Center (AfriNIC) was created in 2004 to manage allocations for Africa After Jon Postel's death in 1998, IANA became part of ICANN, a California nonprofit established in September 1998 by the U.S. government and awarded a contract by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Initially two board members were elected by the Internet community at large, though this was changed by the rest of the board in 2002 in a poorly attended public meeting in Accra, Ghana.
In 1992 the Internet Society (ISOC) was founded, with a mission to "assure the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world". Its members include individuals (anyone may join) as well as corporations, organizations, governments, and universities. The IAB was renamed the Internet Architecture Board, and became part of ISOC. The Internet Engineering Task Force also became part of the ISOC. The IETF is overseen currently by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), and longer-term research is carried on by the Internet Research Task Force and overseen by the Internet Research Steering Group.