Internet Governance

Internet governance consists of a system of laws, rules, policies and practices that dictate how its board members manage and oversee the affairs of any internet related- regulatory body. 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 future. (Internet governance should not be confused with e-governance, which refers to governmental use of technology in its governing duties.)

Background

No one 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 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 temporal, 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 16 November 2005, 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.

Definition

The definition of Internet governance has been contested by differing groups across political and ideological lines. One of the main debates concerns the authority and participation of certain actors, such as national governments, corporate entities and civil society, to play a role in the Internet's governance.

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 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

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. 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. 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.

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.

At the first World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva in 2003, the topic of Internet governance was discussed. ICANN's status as a private corporation under contract to the U.S. government created controversy among other governments, especially Brazil, China, South Africa, and some Arab states. Since no general agreement existed even on the definition of what comprised Internet governance, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan initiated a Working Group on Internet Governance ( WGIG) to clarify the issues and report before the second part of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis 2005. After much controversial debate, during which the U.S. delegation refused to consider surrendering the U.S. control of the Root Zone file, participants agreed on a compromise to allow for wider international debate on the policy principles. They agreed to establish an Internet Governance Forum (IGF), to be convened by the United Nations Secretary General before the end of the second quarter of 2006. The Greek government volunteered to host the first such meeting.

Annual global IGFs have been held since 2006, with the Forum renewed for five years by the United Nations General Assembly in December 2010. In addition to the annual global IGF, regional IGFs have been organized in Africa, the Arab region, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as in sub-regions. in December 2015, the United Nations General Assembly renewed the IGF for another ten years, in the context of the WSIS 10-year overall review.

Media Freedom

Media, freedom of expression and freedom of information have been long recognized as principles of internet governance, included in the 2003 Geneva Declaration and 2005 Tunis Commitment of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Given the crossborder, decentralized nature of the internet, an enabling environment for media freedom in the digital age requires global multi-stakeholder cooperation and shared respect for human rights. In broad terms, two different visions have been seen to shape global internet governance debates in recent years: fragmentation versus common principles.

On the one hand, some national governments, particularly in the Central and Eastern European and Asia-Pacific regions, have emphasized state sovereignty as an organizing premise of national and global internet governance. In some regions, data localization laws—requiring that data be stored, processed and circulated within a given jurisdiction—have been introduced to keep citizens' personal data in the country, both to retain regulatory authority over such data and to strengthen the case for greater jurisdiction. Countries in the Central and Eastern European, Asia-Pacific, and African regions all have legislation requiring some localization. Data localization requirements increase the likelihood of multiple standards and the fragmentation of the internet, limiting the free flow of information, and in some cases increasing the potential for surveillance, which in turn impacts on freedom of expression.

On the other hand, the dominant practice has been towards a unified, universal internet with broadly shared norms and principles. The NETmundial meeting, held in Brazil in 2014, produced a multistakeholder statement the 'internet should continue to be a globally coherent, interconnected, stable, unfragmented, scalable and accessible network-of-networks.' In 2015, UNESCO's General Conference endorsed the concept of Internet Universality and the 'ROAM Principles', which state that the internet should be ‘(i) Human Rights-based (ii) Open, (iii) Accessible to all, and (iv) Nurtured by Multistakeholder participation’. The ROAM Principles combine standards for process (multi-stakeholderism to avoid potential capture of the internet by a single power center with corresponding risks), with recommendations about substance (what those principles should be). The fundamental position is for a global internet where ROAM principles frame regional, national and local diversities. In this context, significant objectives are media freedom, network interoperability, net neutrality and the free flow of information (minimal barriers to the rights to receive and impart information across borders, and any limitations to accord with international standards).

In a study of 30 key initiatives aimed at establishing a bill of rights online during the period between 1999 and 2015, researchers at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center found that the right to freedom of expression online was protected in more documents (26) than any other right. The UN General Assembly committed itself to multistakeholderism in December 2015 through a resolution extending the WSIS process and IGF mandate for an additional decade. It further underlined the importance of human rights and media-related issues such as the