The reports of the death of multistakeholder Internet governance have been greatly exaggerated. But persistent misunderstanding of the phenomenon of multistakeholderism is indeed a potentially lethal threat to the future of the Internet.

“The king is dead, long live the king.” Famously associated with the English monarchy, similar expressions of simultaneous rupture and continuance are found throughout the history of political governance. The historian Ernst Kantorowicz showed in his brilliant and often-repurposed book The King’s Two Bodies that any type of political governance lives in two shells. The first body is the physical, corporal and even institutional shell that inevitably is shrugged off when its time has come. The second body often lives on—that is, the legitimizing principle from which the first body draws its sovereign authority and which forms its body politic that supports it. What exactly the legitimizing principle is obviously varies depending on the setting. For an absolute monarchy, it could be as simple as a divine right of kings, while a parliamentary monarchy might concentrate on securing property. For the young American democracy rejecting British rule end of the 18^th Century, the legitimizing principle was the consent of the governed.

And if we adopt this heuristic for Internet governance? The most obvious core feature of the Internet and the wider cyberspace domain that it is part of is the vast number of actors interacting in a web of largely non-hierarchal relationships. The eminent Harvard scholar Josesph Nye reintroduced the “regime-complex” model of International Relations to show how a number of different organizations interact together to give shape to Internet governance. It isn’t a leap to say that the legitimizing principle of Internet governance is the plurality of actors that underpins it and forms the network of networks. After all, the main difference between the global Internet and the other internets that have preceded it (like the French MiniTel or the Soviet OGAS) is this diversity of actors that gives it form, makes it bottom-up and end-to-end, and fundamentally resilient to capture and disruption.

If working with actor plurality is the Second Body of the Internet, it follows that the First Body of the Internet is the mode for doing so—and for many reasons we shall discuss later, it is appropriate to call it the multistakeholder model. Like with any other definition or even legal concepts in political governance, the implicit definition of multistakeholder has changed over time. It’s even possible to delineate distinct Internet multistakeholder reigns over the last forty-odd years or so. And yet, for some, the battle to refute what has long become a staple part of international governance has apparently taken on a higher calling.

Milton Mueller really does not like the term multistakeholder, as he makes clear yet again in his essay “The Power to Govern Ourselves: (Multi)Stakeholders, States and Collective Action.” He considers it a vacuous phrase, telling us we should prefer other terms like “global self-governance of non-state actors” exercising something called “non-hierarchal network governance,” or even simply complaining that multistakeholderism is “a longer and uglier word for pluralism.” He seems genuinely confused as to why anyone would use it, labeling it simply a “compromised public relations concept” that “seems to first emerge in UN meetings in the 1990s”.

It would be generous to call this reductive in the extreme. In one fell swoop, Mueller summarized and dismissed the entirety of liberal International Relations discussions on world society, global and transnational governance started by Hedely Bull, Robert Keohane and Josesph Nye in the 1970s and 1980s, which gave rise to wide discussion on stakeholder-focused governance that prompted much thinking in the 1990s. By the mid-1990s, the term multistakeholder was used as a key part of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit (the very first major sustainable development and climate change conference), and by the end of the decade, four other international initiatives explicitly invoked the term to describe a model of government-private sector-civil society cooperation. One of these World Bank initiatives, the World Commission on Damns, also provided us one of the best quotes on multistakeholderism, calling it “never a neat, tidy, organized concerto. More often, the process becomes a messy, loose-knit, exasperating cacophony. Like pluralist democracy, it is the absolute worst form of consensus-building except for all the others.” The longevity of the concept is also to be seen in the Sustainable Development Goals, which are still relevant today, which explicitly list the Multistakeholder Partnerships as being the main implementation device under SDG17.

Exactly what the balance of power between the various actor groups is often distinct to its interpretation of the term multistakeholder, but that kind of ambiguity seems to infuriate Mueller. By implying that only clear voting rights can be the standard of judging a distribution of power, he effectively invalidates the entirety of deliberative democracy theory, of which Jürgen Habermas is but one famous proponent, which states that actual deliberation and discussion are as much sources of legitimacy as voting. Further, as Anne Marie-Slaughter recently pointed out in her excellent recent Foreign Affairs article, it is a staple part of modern governance thought and practice to consider “input legitimacy” when assessing which actors should be formally invited to a process. Indeed, invitations are often not needed at all: as then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in 2009 when outlining her vision of a “multipartner” world, this type of governance aimed to ensure “a place at the table to any nation, group, or citizen willing to shoulder a fair share of the burden.” This thinking has certainly continued amongst the like-minded governments. In the May 2024 International Cyberspace and Digital Policy Strategy the US Department of State committed itself not only to advancing multistakeholder discussions but also emphasized that this was practical and not ideological: aiming for “digital solidarity” was only possible when those who were most involved in building and running the Internet where involved in as many of the related governance aspects as possible.

It’s not only the intellectual tradition of multistakeholderism that Mueller has difficulty with, it’s also the earliest applications of it to the Internet. When referring to the earliest US government strategies on the management of DNS and the birth of ICANN, he says, “I don’t mean to break the hearts of the advocates for the multistakeholder model, but the term multistakeholder was not used in the formation of the Internet Community.” Sorry- actually, he doesn’t say this—what he says is “....in the formation of any of the I* Institutions.” Muller’s translation of the 1994 term “Internet community” for “I* (Eye-Stars, today considered to be the top-level governance bodies such as ICANN, IETF, IEEE, and W3C but also today the RIRs and ccTLDs) is too narrow. Ira Magaziner, President Bill Clinton’s leading advisor on the topic and the author of both the Green Paper and the White Paper, which led to the formation of ICANN, wrote a lot about the importance of “working with all stakeholders” in both key documents. In fact, the term “stakeholder” comes up nine times in the Green Paper and in the White Paper and is often used interchangeably with the term Internet Community. Also, the major difference between the Green and White Paper is the expanded definition of the Internet Community, which takes more into account the business and non-technical stakeholders. Magaziner made it clear that the Clinton strategy was only to deal with a small part of the Internet governance ecosystem (that which would become ICANN and which should be non-state led), and wasn’t supposed to provide for a “monolithic structure for Internet governance.”

One attempt to tackle Internet governance as a whole was the WSIS Process. Mueller identifies the WGIG/WSIS process of 2002-2005 as the first entry of the “multistakeholder rhetoric” and seems to blame it squarely on governments’ eagerness to encroach on the Internet community’s “autonomy.” It requires a bit of a leap to refer to the existing state as being one of “autonomy,” given the NTIA’s influence over the IANA function and ICANN at the time. At best, this autonomy was accidental, or de facto, due to a lack of prior government involvement. Now that governments have started to flex their muscles in this domain, WSIS looks more like a clever way to re-direct their attention. While Mueller is right that “public policy” pertaining to the Internet is clearly stated as to be led by states, he ignores that in the 2005 Tunis Declaration the technical and operational part of managing the Internet is separated, and clearly assigned to the private sector. This split, what Wolfgang Kleinwächter has called policy ON the Internet and policy OF the Internet, has remained one of the most important ones in Internet governance today. It has allowed other policy concepts to be developed that better represent these interests and tasks—Technical Internet Governance on the one hand, for instance, Digital Cooperation on the other, to name just two examples. What has remained stable—despite the best efforts of some and the outright denial of others - is the non-state actor lead in the former, and the primacy of government interests in the latter. This deal worked not only until 2014—the Netmundial Process and “peak multistakeholderism”, according to Mueller—but also to the present day.

Mueller gives three examples of why he thinks multistakeholderism is in retreat—and all three are faulty. He states that in recent years the US and the EU have been striving to control DNS, while the opposite is true. In the United States, a specific exception was made to treating DNS as a critical infrastructure despite recent legislation to do exactly that. In Europe, despite ICANN’s inaction, the changes to WHOIS policy forced by the new NIS2 Directive have generally been welcomed as a positive by many in the industry and have not weakened ICANN itself. Since 2019 a number of UN bodies have increasingly deployed differing interpretations of multistakeholderism. For instance, “the multistakeholders” even became a regular noun, a specific actor category during the Ad Hoc Committee (AHC) negotiations on cybercrime. Mueller also seems to imply that Netmundial+10 “failed” as multistakeholderism is not what it once used to be, instead of the more obvious conclusion, namely that Brazil and ICANN are not what they used to be.

ICANN itself is a poster case of how definitions of multistakeholderism can change. During Göran Marby’s tenure, the otherwise laudable aim of concentrating on Technical Internet Governance developed into a misplaced excuse to rigorously hide away from participating in the many digital policy discussions, perhaps in the inexplicably naive hope that governments would “return the favor” and not involve themselves in the operational and technical Internet discussions. The musings of the G7 and G20, the increased pressure from the BRICS nations in leading a hostile WSIS+20 coalition but even continued tinkering on their own BRICS Internet concept shows how illusionary this was. Even more strange has been ICANN’s New York Office’s apparent belief that its interests were best pursued by encouraging friendly governments to talk on their behalf, rather than having a confident voice of its own. What this looks like became apparent in the 2022 IGF in Addis Ababa—where the rich global North lectured the global South on why they needed ICANN—and has continued since. This development has given much credence to those saying that ICANN is a pure proxy for Western governments and especially US business interests. But it also empowered those supposed “moderate” voices—like the UN’s Tech Envoy—to develop their own government-first version of multistakeholderism; hence, in the Global Digital Compact Policy Brief Number 5 the technical community didn’t even exist. When, in the final throws of the GDC drafting process, the Tech Envoy clashed with those Western tech ambassadors, the lack of ICANN’s involvement was keenly felt.

But another wrinkle in the multistakeholder journey was the reaction of part of the technical Internet community to this triple threat of ICANN abdication, UN/GDC usurpation, and a potential WSIS+20 insurrection. The founding of the Technical Community Coalition for Multistakeholderism (TCCM) has clearly resurrected “the spirit of Montevideo” and is perhaps the clearest sign yet that many voices from the body politic of the Internet are not quite ready to bury a concept that has worked very well indeed.

And this is the point: multistakeholderism, as the First Body of the Internet, is always being re-defined, in the UN, in ICANN, and indeed in all parts of the cyberspace regime complex. Irrespective of one’s personal preferences and which actor is in the lead; the great common denominator remains. The various multistakeholder definitions or reigns all draw on the same legitimizing principle of the Internet today—the “pluralism”, as Mueller calls it—which is the only power that can grant the crown of a meaningful actor in Internet governance. So, if multistakeholderism is dead - long live multistakeholderism! For those of us who wish for a non-state-led Internet to prevail, it is of paramount importance that we don’t abandon such a useful concept and let less benevolent interpretations rule.