Where is the Governance in Internet Governance?

Abstract

In this paper we take issue with the prevailing conceptualization of Internet governance. Our quarrel isn’t so much with the verbal definition itself; it is with the way the term “Internet governance” is used and applied. Currently, the label is routinely applied to the study of a few formal global governance organizations such as ICANN, the Internet Governance Forum and its predecessor, the World Summit on the Information Society. A very large part of the Internet governance field’s scholarly literature tends to focus almost exclusively on these formal international institutions involved in explicit discussions of the global governance of the Internet. On the other hand, the term “Internet governance” is not normally applied to studies of many real-world activities and problems that play a crucial role in shaping and regulating the way the Internet really works. Interconnection agreements among Internet service providers, routing arrangements, content filtering, the control of spam, phishing and botnets, for example, are not, for the most part, grouped under the field label.