Global Governance – Who Should Regulate the Internet?

Check out this useful Foreign Affairs essay on the tricky problem of how to regulate the Internet as more and more countries have a stake in how the Internet develops and evolves. I think the burden rests on foreign critics who want to alter the existing system. Fears of U.S. “unilateralism” strike me as overblown in this context because even if the U.S. government decided to exercise direct control over the Internet (which it currently does not), other countries can at that point threaten to break off. In other words, retaining control of the Internet seems to offer relatively little leverage to a particular country.



On the other hand, shifting the Internet to an inter-governmental organization will expose Internet regulation to some of the inefficiencies of global governance. Countries with very little at stake will likely get a “voice” in the process, thus, complicating what should otherwise be very technical decisionmaking. Even worse, countries will interests in improving domestic censorship of the Internet, like China, will get a crack to facilitating this process on the international level.



It is galling, I know, for some countries to have to accept “country suffixes” etc chosen by some American. But the world has survived a telephone system where America has a country code of “001” without any serious effects.