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, 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. 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. 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. Law professor Yochai Benkler developed a conceptualization of Internet governance by the idea of three "layers" of governance:
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"; 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". 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. Internet governance now constitutes a college-level field of study with many syllabi available.
History
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