Slides used in a debate on a "third way" for Internet Governance at CITI, Columbia University, Nov. 12, 2013. Discusses Internet Governance issues; refutes "one governance" for the whole Internet. Provides graphic on function and scaling of Internet Governance mechanisms. Among the participants were Eli Noam, Milton Mueller, Fred Goldstein, Lorenzo Pupillo, and John Curran. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-NC

1. Future Internet Governance?
Internet Governance as Piñata
Alejandro Pisanty
Facultad de Química, Universidad Nacional
Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM)
Internet Society Mexico

2. Internet Governance as Piñata
• Beat hard but don’t break – resilient
• Bring it out in times of need
• Especially domain names because they seem
understandable
• 1996-1999 formation of ICANN
• 2003-2005 WSIS
• 2013 post-Snowden
• Kick the can to “Internet Governance” to avoid
hard work of “Snooping Governance”

3. One Internet… one Governance?
• Bottom-up, edge-inwards, problem-focussed – let’s call it heuristic
approach
• Layers and segmentation
• Parametrize on “other governance” eg ISO 3166-MA for country
codes
• IETF – standards development
• IANA then ICANN – central identifiers coordination
• M3AAWG – spam, then messaging abuse
• APWG – phishing
• Intellectual property (view outside US: your funny ways of mixing
authors rights, patents and trademarks)
• Rights and abuse
• National and subnational regimes

4. Technical infusion in Internet
Governance
• Internet as produced environment – much
more so than any construct like “the
environment”, the sea, space, Antarctica
(which also have multistakeholder governance
to some extent)
• Social and legal constructs can mandate
technology only so much, esp. from top

5. So again, ONE governance?
• Single ceiling, umbrella, gearbox, fish school?
(no can do)
• “Fish school” coordination an option
• Test for types of Internet Governance
according to mission, effectiveness, scalability
• And mind the scale factors!
– Is it numbers? Of what? (people, countries,
domain names, TLDs, )

6. Multistakeholder governance
effectiveness and scalability
Scales to large
Doesn’t scale
“Magic path”
Doesn’t work
Works to mission