Internet governance is interesting because its challenges require us to rethink some of the ways we manage globally. Just as the environmental can no longer be adequately managed by national states alone, the proper development of the Internet requires a type of coordination that spans national boundaries and includes other parties than governments.

It is quite accepted in the different fora where debates occur on Internet governance related issues that governments alone cannot and should not be the only decisional stakeholders. The private sector and civil society are now accepted as de facto players in the field. Our classical international governance models however, provide us with relatively little experience in solving global challenges of the nature that the Internet has brought about.

The nature of the Internet dictates that its governance touch on matters that are technical, legal, economic and socio-cultural. As a case in point, the mere introduction of internationalized top-level domain names (.tél for example) requires the involvement of the technical people within the IETF and ICANN, of the private sector to operate the new TLD, and could involve governments (for example if .tél, the abbreviation for the French word “téléphone” also meant “sex” in arabic) or copyright holders (if a Belgian company was called “.tél” for example). These matters are complex, and the general lack of recognized and accepted means of agreeing on these matters makes it worse.

Other even more complex challenges must be dealt with if internauts are to continue to be able to use the Internet with confidence. How will spam be dealt with? Do we even agree on what unsolicited email is? If it is merely mail that I have not solicited, then probably 75% of the mail I receive even from friends could be said to be unsolicited in the sense that I didn’t explicitly ask for it. Should companies be able to advertise freely using the Internet? Which legislature should apply when spam reaching European internauts originates from Canada and transits through US-based servers? Answers to these questions are not obvious.

However challenging Internet governance issues may be, they must be dealt with in order to ensure the graceful evolution of the Internet. Because the nature of the Internet itself changes constantly, it is dangerous to think that past methods used to solve Internet-related challenges will continue to work. Note that this does not mean they will not work, just that we should be vigilant in choosing the problem-solving methods we will use.