Extensive literature has provided evidence of the organic nature of the Internet as adomain for different sorts of activities. Most policy making regarding the Internet,however, has focused on its economic dimensions (e.g. e-commerce, copyrights,privacy) while taking timid steps when it comes to its cultural and social dimensions.We propose a more comprehensive approach for global policy making on the Internetby looking retrospectively at processes that led to the creation of urban parks, andexamining those processes in light of public goods theory. We conducted historicaland theoretical analyses to show that, in the same way urban parks define spacesthat mediate between different functions of the city, it is possible to define bufferspaces within the Internet that mediate between competing spheres of activity. As acomplex phenomenon involving infrastructure, applications, and content, the Internetpossesses features that can be located at different points between purely private andpurely public goods. This fact parallels the growing attention that public goodstheorists are paying to non-economic factors to explain the provisions of goodsunder circumstances that do not easily fit supply/demand laws. We argue that urbanparks, as hybrid public goods, offer a reference for the design of policies thatharmonize competing interests because they are spaces justified by manifold rationales(economic, political, social and cultural). As parks offer possibilities for spontaneousre-appropriations of the city as a cohesive entity (i.e. something beyond adisconnected collection of populations), defining similar multi-purpose spaces on theInternet would facilitate coexistence of competing and complementary behavioursby allowing users to re-appropriate this technology as a comprehensive entity beyonda mere aggregation of transactions and interests.