View 1: We’re in a good place.

The Multistakeholder model will reach maturity this year after WSIS+20 and the Internet Governance Forum’s (IGF) expected new mandate. The IGF remains malleable enough to have practical purpose, and mature enough to shed some of its former rancour, both of which will help stakeholders adapt to developments in technology and geopolitics. ICANN is successfully fulfilling its mandate, engaging well with the international community and proving its value. It’s likely to deliver a new set of global top-level domain names on time, just as access to broadband connectivity grows, thanks to investment in non-geostationary satellite networks and advanced undersea cables that increase the routes each country has into the digital economy. The business constituency is set to prosper. If not perfect, the One-World-One-Internet endowment looks here to stay, and we can take a breath.

View 2: We’re in a strange place.

The very meaning of ‘multistakeholder’ divides between those who believe in disaggregated decision making and those who believe it’s a form of chatter indulged by the UN, which holds final oversight. Both believe the IGF should be renewed, the latter group because the IGF is now malleable, bending to those who provide the resources to support it. This influence is growing just as smaller Internet businesses need the IGF to be a stable contrast to the erratic macro that makes their business models feel shaky. Even ICANN is challenged because AI, spurred by growing compute and throughput, changes the economics of how the Internet is used, and because governments seek their own solutions to continued access to the DNS. Nobody wants to wake up to a denial of service by a foreign partner because of some over-jocular provincial add campaign.

The Third Way…

There’s never stasis (certainly not in 2025). Businesses must continue to lead in defusing Sovereignty concerns which are, after all, a costly form of exceptionalism. There’s a positive role for the IGF here as well: to shape or at least to compile standards, assert best practice, and not deride so much as work with the business constituency to establish good, harmonized policy adoption, rather than leaving non-standard (sovereign) solutions to emerge. Sovereignty concerns will also fall hard on ICANN, whose able leadership must explain even more persuasively why the DNS will be here for users today and tomorrow, no matter what the national politics. Finally, ICANN, the RIRs and ISPs will need to engage with Internet governance and AI governance. Large-scale AI models and AI-driven applications affect Internet businesses; they are also hosted and accessed through the Internet like the cybersecurity and content moderation which enable so much of digital trade. Of course, it matters in what forums these challenges are addressed: multilateral, multistakeholder, or national. But more than that, each issue needs a champion because the Multistakeholder Model, like the world around it, is not in a settled place, and as it moves into 2026 there’s still a lot of leadership to claim.