After Permanence, After Pretense: Internet Governance Is Shifting from Consent to Velocity

The room in New York was calm in the way institutional rooms often are when outcomes have already been agreed elsewhere. There were no objections raised, no visible fractures, no sense that the future of Internet governance was being contested. When the Internet Governance Forum was discussed, permanence was framed as a technical correction, an overdue stabilization of a successful experiment. The implication that an institution designed to remain light, provisional, and deliberately limited had now acquired weight passed largely without comment.

Permanence, after all, sounds reassuring.

In governance, however, reassurance often signals that the most consequential shifts have already taken place quietly, procedurally, and without confrontation.

In December 2025, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the WSIS+20 outcome document, granting the IGF a permanent mandate within the UN system¹. The language was carefully structured; it reaffirmed “multistakeholder” without defining it, emphasized inclusion, and avoided any explicit transfer of authority. Read narrowly, it appeared to preserve continuity, but when it is read structurally, it altered the conditions under which legitimacy must now be sustained.

This distinction matters because Internet Governance has never rested primarily on legality. It rests on legitimacy, on the consent produced by process rather than command. Systems can remain legally intact while losing the confidence of the communities that give them life. WSIS+20 did not change the law of Internet Governance, it changed its risk profile.

The IGF’s legitimacy did not flow from formal authorization; it emerged from the fact that no single actor could claim ownership.

Its original design, articulated in the Tunis Agenda, explicitly denied it decision-making authority and endorsement power². The IGF was meant to convene without concluding, to surface issues without resolving them, and to provide visibility without validation. Its inability to endorse outcomes was not a limitation; it was a safeguard. As a dialogue Platform with non-binding Outcomes, incubator for Ideas, and within the spirit of its Mandate, No actor, governmental or otherwise, could plausibly claim that the forum spoke for the Internet.

Permanence places that design logic under strain.

Institutions that persist acquire continuity, staffing, routines, and synthesis authority. Over time, these attributes generate influence even without formal power. Agenda formation becomes path dependent. Narrative condensation acquires weight. Summaries, once understood as descriptive, begin to circulate as reference points. None of this violates the IGF’s mandate; however, all of it changes its effect.

Yet, this is not conjecture. The IGF’s own operational structure, including the Multistakeholder Advisory Group, agenda-setting workflows, and synthesis practices, already demonstrates how influence emerges without decision-making authority³. Permanence does not introduce this dynamic. It amplifies it!.

At the same time, the external environment in which the IGF now operates has shifted dramatically. Governments are no longer tentative participants learning the grammar of multistakeholder. They are coordinated, well-resourced, and increasingly unwilling to wait for consensus processes to converge.

Digital policy and the Broad Term of “Sovereignty” have become inseparable from national security, economic strategy, and geopolitical alignment. States are moving faster, and they are doing so largely outside traditional community pathways.

This acceleration is visible across regions. State-led digital compacts, intergovernmental coordination mechanisms, and executive strategies increasingly preceded multistakeholder consultation rather than follow it. Community input is often invited after drafts and after positions have hardened. The consultation exists, but the decision has already moved.

Multistakeholder governance was not designed to move at the speed the political urgency demands, but to ensure that decisions reached at a speed that retain legitimacy and inclusion. When the IGF functioned as a deliberately light forum, this mismatch was buffered. The absence of endorsement power limited its usefulness as a site of policy validation, and while the Governments could participate, but they could not easily instrumentalize the forum. Permanence alters that calculus. A UN-anchored IGF with institutional continuity becomes an attractive venue for soft legitimization, a place where positions shaped elsewhere can be presented as consultative or broadly supported, even when the substantive work occurred outside the community, and we have experienced this elsewhere.

This is the core risk: Not an overt takeover, but the procedural laundering.

Endorsement does not require votes, and validation does not require resolutions. In contemporary governance, narrative authority itself becomes power. When synthesis documents and institutional outputs circulate within UN systems, the line between dialogue and endorsement blurs. Over time, the IGF risks being valued less for the diversity of voices it hosts and more for the institutional credibility it can confer, and while this is not a failure of intent, it is reasonably a consequence of structure.

The most under-examined tension in Internet Governance today is temporal rather than ideological. Governments operate on compressed timelines driven by electoral cycles, crisis framing, economical and geopolitical pressure. Digital policy is bundled with trade, security, and industrial strategy. Coordination happens through ministries and executive offices capable of moving in weeks rather than years.

The technical community and civil society operate differently. Their authority derives from deliberation, peer review, open and transparent consultation, and volunteer participation. These processes are slower by design. They privilege correctness over velocity, inclusion over alignment, and resilience over rapid convergence.

When these two temporal regimes collide, speed wins unless deliberately restrained.

The danger is not only exclusion of Resource members or some Technical institutions, it is outrunning. Where consultation becomes retrospective, engagement becomes symbolic, Multistakeholder survives formally while hollowing out substantively.

Embedding the IGF permanently within the UN system at precisely this moment intensifies that risk. It places a consensus-oriented forum inside an institutional environment increasingly used to legitimize fast-moving governmental initiatives. Without exceptional discipline, the IGF may find itself reflecting outcomes shaped elsewhere rather than shaping them through genuine contestation.

Africa illustrates this dynamic in concentrated form, not as an exception, but as an early indicator. The continent has moved decisively from marginal participation toward coordinated digital ambition. Through Smart Africa, governments have aggregated influence and aligned positions in pursuit of scale⁴. Engagement with institutions such as ICANN has expanded capacity and representation⁵. Development partners, including GIZ, have supported governance-related programs designed to accelerate readiness and coordination⁶. These developments are real, and they matter, but coordination has costs.

As governmental alignment accelerates, internal multistakeholder anchoring has not always kept pace. Technical operators, network builders, and community actors are frequently consulted late, selectively, or in parallel rather than through binding processes. Positions are increasingly formed intergovernmental and presented as settled before meaningful contestation occurs.

This pattern is not uniquely African. Similar dynamics are visible in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Africa matters here because its governance institutions are still consolidating and because the trade-off between speed and consent is therefore easier to see.

Centralization framed as unity remains centralization.

The role of external partners further complicates this picture. ICANN has consistently stated that its engagement is supportive rather than directive, focused on capacity building rather than policy ownership⁷. GIZ’s program documentation similarly emphasizes facilitation rather than authorship⁷. These distinctions are legally accurate. Operationally, they are harder to maintain.

Influence does not require authorship. It flows through convening, coordination, and continuity. When the same actors help organize processes, shape participation, and resource engagement, the boundary between support and process ownership becomes difficult to discern. When legitimacy is later questioned, responsibility disperses.

This is not an accusation; it is an observable governance pattern.

Internet governance systems fail not when rules are broken, but when consent thins. The Tunis Agenda did not create authority; it constructed legitimacy through restraint². Once that restraint weakens, legality cannot compensate. Trust cannot be declared, it must be reproduced continuously through process.

The familiar reassurance that governments must lead because digital policy implicates sovereignty, misstates the problem. Governments have always had a role. What has changed is their speed, their coordination, and their increasing willingness to bypass community mediation. Multistakeholder governance does not fail when states participate. It fails when state action consistently precedes community deliberation.

One year from now, the consequences of IGF permanence will not appear in resolutions or press releases. They will appear in subtler signals: in which issues reach the agenda without contest, in how synthesis narratives converge toward governmental consensus, in whose absence goes unnoticed, and in whether consultation meaningfully precedes coordination.

WSIS+20 did not resolve the future of Internet governance, it relocated the test rather.

The IGF now carries a burden heavier than the one it was designed to bear. Permanence will not protect it from capture by speed. Only discipline will.

Discipline in agenda formation, Discipline in resisting endorsement creep, and Discipline in preserving disagreement rather than editing it out of synthesis.

Without that discipline, permanence will not stabilize the IGF, it will repurpose it.