Internet Governance

ICANN’s Picture of Itself

ICANN has released its draft new budget. The document gives us a good look at how ICANN sees itself. It's arguably an internally inconsistent view. ...This budget calls for ICANN to have almost 60 staff members by the end of the next fiscal year. Expenses under this budget are predicted to be twice those of last year ($16 million v. $8 million). more

The Multi-Stakeholder Mirage: How Internet Governance Turned Attendance Into Mandate

Internet multi-stakeholder governance mistakes participation for legitimacy, granting policy processes implied authority without public authorization. As IPv4 becomes capital, operator accountability, not attendance, should define binding decision-making and institutional legitimacy instead of consensus. more

DNS Abuse Is Stealing India’s Youth: Fake Domains and the Job-Seeking Trap

Fake recruitment websites exploiting India's young job seekers are proliferating, exposing millions to identity theft, financial fraud and malware while regulators, registrars and digital literacy programs struggle to keep pace with a growing labor market. more

The New Space Race for Connectivity: Satellite Internet and Critical Infrastructure

Satellite internet is from backup to core infrastructure, as LEO constellations, non-terrestrial networks and direct-to-device services reshape connectivity, forcing governments and operators to rethink resilience, sovereignty and the architecture of the internet. more

Moving Beyond Associated Domain Checks: The Urgent Need to Ban Short-Term Domain Leasing

ICANN's new DNS abuse rules mark progress, yet short-term domain leasing enables fleeting, hard-to-detect attacks. A proposed 30-day minimum lease could curb cybercrime by undermining the economics of weaponised parked domains. more

The IRP Docket Speaks Louder Than Theory - A Response to Charles Mok on ICANN and AI Governance

A critique of ICANN's multi-stakeholder model argues that its accountability record, revealed through more than a dozen IRP disputes, shows structural failures that should caution policymakers seeking institutional blueprints for governing artificial intelligence systems globally. more

Do We Need Alignment Between Internet Governance and AI Governance?

A debate over aligning internet and AI governance reveals stark differences in origin, incentives and power. While lessons from ICANN's multi-stakeholder model endure, AI's corporate dominance and geopolitical rivalry demand new, bottom-up approaches. more

Why the Blackout Never Happened: Internet Governance Lessons From Poland’s Energy Sector

Poland thwarted a large-scale cyberattack on its energy grid without disruption, offering a rare case study in critical infrastructure resilience, decentralised energy governance, and the balancing act between openness and digital security. more

The Internet’s Legitimacy Gap: When Governance Outgrew Its Architecture

Internet governance is shifting from participatory forums to security-driven mandates. As authority accelerates ahead of legitimacy, technical systems face growing instability and operators absorb the risks of politically motivated control. more

The Governance of the Root of the DNS

The arrangements regarding the composition and organisation of the provision and operation of authoritative root servers are one of the more long-lasting aspects of the public Internet. In the late 1980s, Jon Postel, as the IANA, worked with a small set of interested organisations to provide this service. It was informally arranged, without contracts and without payment of any form. more

Just Say What You Mean: Avoiding Deadlock on Enhanced Cooperation in the WSIS+20 Review

On 29 July 2025, the UN organized a WSIS+20 Informal Stakeholder Consultation at which a number of government and stakeholder representations made three-minute statements. This was in response to the Elements Paper circulated by the WSIS+20 Review's Co-facilitators, an important initial step en route to the zero draft of the text that will be the basis of negotiations and consultations over the next months in advance of the formal WSIS Review in the UN General Assembly in December. more

Why Digital Sovereignty Cannot Escape Its Own Contradictions? Reflections for Moving Forward

The debate surrounding digital sovereignty has gained momentum in recent years, particularly within BRICS nations, where governments seek to assert greater control over their digital ecosystems. Proponents of digital sovereignty often frame it as a necessary countermeasure against foreign technological dominance, positioning it as either a "positive" force- fostering local innovation and self-reliance- or a "negative" one- fueling authoritarian control and economic isolation. more

Cyber Resilience Resources Restructuring

Information and Communications (ICT) infrastructures rely on many globally shared critical resilience information resources for diverse essential functions such as identifiers, routing, and cyber security. However, this ICT ecosystem has rapidly become significantly less stable and collaborative with dramatically diminished respect for legal norms and values because of the new USA national Administration. The instability includes the vicarious, wholesale removal of essential public safety and scientific databases, as well as global collaboration with multiple global UN public safety bodies. One result is the scaling of Digital Sovereignty initiatives. more

A Collision Between Tech Policy and Foreign Policy: the UN Cybercrime Convention

Sometime by year-end, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) will vote on the proposed UN Convention Against Cybercrime. The treaty is opposed by most civil liberties organizations and Internet businesses, although the US position appears uncertain, mostly for reasons of foreign policy. more

Human Rights and Standards Development Organizations

Do human rights come into the picture when technology and policy work are involved? If so, where? This is a question that has come up multiple times during the last dozen years, and occasionally even before, in Internet Governance discussions. These discussions have included debates on whether human rights were specifically applicable to protocol design or to the organizations developing protocol standards. more