Internet Governance

The AI Enclosure Movement

The battle over open-source AI echoes England's Enclosure Movement, pitting collaboration against proprietary control as technology firms compete to shape innovation, economic power and the future governance of the digital commons.

From Human Trust to Machine Cryptography: The Infrastructure Deficit in AI Interoperability

As AI agents begin collaborating across the open internet, the absence of trusted identity, authorization, and accountability frameworks threatens interoperability, making cryptographic trust infrastructure essential to building a secure and scalable agentic economy.

ICANN Wiki, SHE.africa, AI, and the Integrity of Digital Platforms

As AI increasingly relies on digital archives, the quiet revision of ICANNWiki entries raises broader questions about platform accountability, historical integrity, and whether institutions can reshape the records that future researchers and machines will treat as fact.

From Access to Agency: Why the IGF-DCAD Fellowship Should Become a Global Standard

The IGF-DCAD fellowship shows that meaningful inclusion requires more than open access. By funding accessibility, leadership and participation, it offers a practical blueprint for making Internet governance genuinely representative of the one-sixth of humanity living with disabilities.

The EU Cyber Resilience Act Regime: A Failure to Know Your Limitations

A cybersecurity historian argues the EU Cyber Resilience Act overreaches through unworkable mandates, sprawling jurisdiction and outdated assumptions, urging a streamlined successor that embraces AI, existing standards and practical enforcement instead of bureaucratic complexity today.

Who Registers the Domain That Steals Your Data? The Registrar Accountability Gap in India’s DNS Abuse Crisis

India's DNS abuse crisis exposes a registrar accountability gap: malicious domains remain online while vulnerable users bear the cost. Concentrated abuse patterns suggest stronger oversight and faster mitigation could significantly reduce predictable harms nationwide today.

The Algorithmic Ceiling: How AI Surveillance Criminalizes Disability

AI surveillance systems increasingly classify human differences as algorithmic risk, leaving persons with disabilities vulnerable to exclusion, misclassification, and invisible barriers that threaten decades of progress in accessibility, accountability, and digital inclusion throughout public infrastructure.

Who Is “the Community”? The Missing Constitutional Question in Multistakeholder Internet Governance

Internet-governance bodies routinely invoke "the community" to legitimize decisions. The Constituent Community Doctrine asks who holds authority, how mandates are conferred, and when institutional claims exceed, distort or outlive the consent on which they rest.

Digital Sovereignty Is More Than Data Sovereignty: Understanding Africa’s Digital Dependency Stack

Africa's pursuit of digital sovereignty demands more than keeping data at home. True resilience depends on controlling the infrastructure, platforms, cybersecurity capabilities, governance, and human expertise that underpin an increasingly interconnected digital economy across Africa.

The Question Isn’t Whether the Harm Is Real - It’s Who Should Act

Measuring online abuse can reveal its scale, but not who should intervene. Effective policy must distinguish harm from contractual responsibility, identify the actors best placed to act, and target remedies where they can work effectively.

The gTLD Registrar Market Is Uniform in Rules, Not in Structure

ICANN applies identical rules to every registrar, yet new research reveals a sharply unequal market where seven firms capture half of inflows, renewals dominate activity, and many accreditations barely operate at all in practice today.

What the i2Coalition Article Misses About DNS Abuse

Authors defend research showing malicious domain registrations occur at industrial scale, arguing that blocklist data is reliable and that policymakers must prioritize prevention alongside mitigation to curb cybercriminal exploitation of the domain name market globally.

Shaping the Future of the IGF: Integration, Relevance and Impact in the Post-WSIS+20 Era

The Internet Governance Forum has secured its permanent place in the UN system. Its next challenge is to strengthen its relevance, deepen multistakeholder collaboration, and deliver greater impact across an increasingly complex and fragmented digital governance landscape.

The Implementation Gap: Why Africa’s Digital Strategies Rarely Become Digital Reality

Africa has digital strategies in abundance, but weak institutions, inconsistent leadership, poor governance and limited execution keep ambitious policies from delivering trusted, interoperable public services and sustainable digital transformation across the continent in practice today.

Continuity Is Not Legitimacy: Why Internet Institutions Need a Governance Stress Test

Internet institutions can remain operational while losing the legitimacy that sustains their authority. A proposed governance stress test distinguishes continuity from legitimacy, helping expose capture, substitution, and accountability failures before institutional crises become irreversible realities.