The very peripheral and autonomous, almost anarchic, character of the Internet led to the fact that no single actor was able to control the whole of it. Instead, different sectors are regulated by a range of different governance arrangements in which competences, responsibilities and functions vary between international, public and private actors and which must be constantly renegotiated. State actors and international organizations partly compete with private actors, partly surrender the domain to them, and occasionally they try to recapture their governance authority from them. For example, the management of domain names quickly came under pressure by the institutionalization and commercialization of the Internet and is now a political issue. Therefore, attention has to be directed to the question to what extent and in what way different governance arrangements are able to generate legitimacy. Thereto, the paper is aiming at a comparative appraisal of the legitimatory quality of different patterns of governance regulating the Internet infrastructure (notably the allocation of domain names) by applying a framework of indicators for their assessment. The indicators are selected from the IR scholary debate on legitimacy of global governance arrangements and structured by a multi-dimensional concept of legitimacy (input-, throughput- and output-dimension). This framework is then applied to international, transnational and private forms of Internet Governance. As far as the chosen indicators show a legitimizing effect, they could serve as a standard for upcoming research studies and, by this, contribute to further systematization of studies on global governance.
