Global Internet Governance: Actors, Regulations, Transactions, and Strategies

Abstract

Twenty years ago, the earlier controversies regarding human rights implications of Internet uses emerged at the national level, leading policymakers to start addressing issues related to e.g. illegal and harmful content vs. freedom of expression; state surveillance, private companies abuses, and various forms of cybercrime activities vs. the protection of privacy and personal data; intellectual property rights vs. a vision of Internet content as commons to foster education, knowledge, innovation and global development. Becoming even more prominent with the development of the web2.0, these debates also led to procedural issues related to the role and liability of Internet intermediaries, in terms of legal, technical and economic aspects. In 2005, the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society added the need to define globally how the Internet should be governed, and how Internet governance processes should be institutionalized, in an open and inclusive manner through the participation of all interested stakeholders and dialogue among them. In the mean time, Internet technical, social and market innovations are developing and raising new issues in various sectors. Many still unresolved challenges thus remain for policymaking decisions, all being highly sensitive in terms of sovereignty and other political, legal, economic, social, cultural and societal choices. Among these crosscutting challenges, we can identify the difficulty to keep pace with numerous Internet innovations in order to make informed choices and decisions on issues that may appear only technical. Global Internet governance is one of these fields where scientific and technical expertise need to join forces with political influence and diplomatic action to address global challenges, channel democratic values and share knowledge to build common visions and improve international relations. This multidisciplinary Panel explores emerging global Internet governance actors, beyond governments, civil society, and the private sector. It analyzes their roles, strategies in Global Internet Governance institutionalization processes, as well as their own induced internal transformations. The Panel examines in particular the roles of Intergovernmental organizations, Internet-related technical communities, as well as that of national Parliaments worldwide, together with their interactions with governments and other stakeholders. It then replaces these diverse institutional actors and strategies in the overall context of the dynamic of institutions building aimed at establishing legitimacy in the global governance of the Internet. The Panel also looks into new forms of regulations on the Internet, and discusses their compliance with good governance values, considering that Internet governance has proven to be much more than a public policy issue given the essential characteristics of this network: global interconnection; distributed management; mostly private coordination and operation. In such a context where the roles of public authorities and private parties are shifting, the Panel then focuses on two important global Internet governance issues: that of the prevention of human rights violations in the online environment, through the concept of due diligence; and that of the transformations of the cultural domain, studying the opportunities and challenges to the diversity of cultural expressions in the digital era.

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