What is internet governance and what issues does it raise?

Résumé du document

The Internet was created by the United States. It took its actual shape in the early 90's with the "World Wide Web". The private companies and individuals decided to invest into it. The Internet has had an exponential growth: from 2 million users in 1994, to 1.250 billion in 2007. The change of scale of the cyberspace puts the focus on the governance of it.

Why do we keep on talking, today, about the governance of the Internet? As we saw before, the Internet is a tool for freedom. The downside of freedom is that, obviously, any information, any content can be found. Including what is called "dark network" like pornography, extremism, hate etc. On the other hand, we have to keep in mind that the cyberspace is constantly evolving and it makes it easy for criminals to infiltrate it.

What do these cyber criminals do? They produce malwares (malicious software); they also take part in cyber espionage which means infiltrating high level political targets, including foreign ministries, embassies, financial institutions etc. Given the fact that cyber-criminality is constantly growing, there's recognition of the serious risks in cyberspace. And, consequently, it raises the need of regulation. That's when we start speaking of the governance of the Internet.

Extraits

[...] In some countries, Internet researches or keywords give few or no results. The authors give the example of Arab countries where when you type on the Internet, no pages are found. We can't speak anymore of freedom of the Internet. Conclusion: Because of its characteristics Internet eases freedom but also criminality. States and private companies decided to fight such criminality but it now raises questions about control, surveillance and compilation of users' data. In other words, we have a governance of the Internet, with a multiplication of actors. [...]

[...] Internet governance used to refer to the coordination of names of domain and addresses (name of domain: .com or .fr). At the beginning, the attribution of domains' names was regulated by the United States, cos they are the ones who created the Internet. But then, it was decided that the ICANN, a private American company, would possess all the domains names and it could rent them. For example, today, facebook pays the ICANN to have facebook.com. In this sense, ICANN became kind of the “government” of the Internet. [...]

[...] But this same governance has many limits and risks. In this sense, we can wonder if, instead of a multi regulation of the Internet, it wouldn't be better to have a regulation from a supra national institution. The International Committee on the Internet may be created within the United Nations but the USA were opposed to this creation because they didn't want to transfer their power. References Jacques Berleur and Yves Poullet, ? Réguler Internet?, in Etudes, 2002/11 Tome 397, p. [...]

[...] What are those pressures? Internet globalizes the possibilities of communication; it massively enlarges our capacity for message generation, duplication, and storage (stockage); it distributes control between a large range of actors; it grew new institutions and, finally, it changes the polity (by facilitating fully interactive communication). However, some people, the “realist” political scientists as Elliot Noss calls them, believe that the States will continue having power and dominance on the Internet. They praise a “bordered Internet”. They are in opposition with the cyber-libertarianism which supports Internet's freedom and independence. [...]

[...] Intervention of the States However, in a few years, the Internet became the privileged place for criminality with hacks, cyber attacks etc. That's when (in 2000) governments started playing an important role in the cyberspace. Indeed, private actors decided they could not any longer carry the burden of the growing number of cyber attacks and asked the States to take their responsibilities. The fact is that, as we already said, the governance by a State of a world network, without frontier or clear regulation, seems complicated. According to Elliot NOSS, the Internet puts too much pressure on the nation-state. [...]