On March 14, 2014, the US government officially announced its intention “to transition key Internet domain name functions to the global multistakeholder community,” (NTIA 2014) relinquishing the special role it previously carried out in the management of the domain name system (DNS).
The decision-making process following this announcement, commonly referred to as the IANA transition, was a milestone in the history of Internet governance, yet curiously it is still under-investigated.
IANA functions are the key tasks of the DNS, providing all devices and systems connected to the Internet with consistency between IP addresses and domain names. Historically managed by the technical community of engineers and academics that created the Internet, in 1998 these functions were transferred to a newly designed organization, ICANN, established as a not-for-profit corporation under California law. The authority of ICANN over the DNS has been contested since the beginning, both because of the dominant role of Western businesses and its relationship with the US government, which reserved for itself a special oversight role (Froomkin 2000; Bygrave 2015; Calandro et al. 2013; Weber and Gunnarson 2012).
The NTIA announcement raised the expectation that these long-standing controversies would be fixed. In the announcement, the multistakeholder model of governance was the key concept guiding the IANA transition process. Not only the IANA transition was supposed to be a multistakeholder effort, in NTIA’s intention it was even expected to “support and enhance the multistakeholder model of Internet policymaking and governance.” Indeed, for many actors it represented the highest implementation of the concept of multistakeholderism within the Internet governance field.
This book explores the extent to which the IANA transition succeeded in establishing a real multistakeholder model for the governance of the DNS and the meaning of the IANA transition in the development of Internet multistakeholder governance.
To fulfill this purpose, it is necessary to briefly retrace the history of multistakeholderism within Internet governance, its meaning, and how the IANA transition is placed within its evolution.
1.1 Multistakeholderism in Internet Governance
The concept of multistakeholder governance appeared in the Internet governance debate during the process that brought to the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS), a UN summit convened by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which took place in two stages: a first summit was held in Geneva from 10 to 12 December 2003, while the second part of the initiative was carried out in Tunis from 16 to 18 November 2005.
First references to a “multistakeholder approach” emerged during the preparatory phase as a middle ground between different positions. On the one side, Western countries and business communities supported the status quo and conceived Internet governance as limited to the technical management of DNS, to be carried out through a regime of private self-regulation with the oversight of the US government. On the other side, several actors contested this view, fostering a broader conception of Internet governance that includes public policy issues. These actors included developing countries that sought the sovereignty of states over the Internet (including DNS) to be exercised through traditional intergovernmental arrangements, as well as transnational civil society calling for a more transparent, accountable, and human rights-based development of the Internet (Mueller 2010; Hofmann 2007; Radu 2019).
The term “multistakeholder” officially entered the language of Internet governance with the establishment of the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) (Kummer 2013). The WGIG was an expert group set up between the two conferences to circumvent the abovementioned political deadlock. It was asked to provide a shared definition of Internet governance, identify the public policy issues that are relevant to this field, and propose a common understanding of the roles and responsibilities of the different stakeholder groups. “Multistakeholder governance” was one of the key concepts in the WGIG final report, which was incorporated into the final output of the summit, the Tunis Agenda.
The WSIS led to the definition of Internet governance as “the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet” (WGIG 2005). Moreover, the WSIS recognized that Internet governance also includes public policy issues under the responsibility of states, which nevertheless are excluded from the day-to-day technical and operational matters entrusted to the private sector. Yet, the WSIS outcomes acknowledged an important role for civil society, academic and international organizations, even though their roles remained roughly approximated.
This definition of Internet governance constitutes a milestone in the history of Internet governance. Despite its vagueness, it represents the full acknowledgment by a broad and variegated Internet community, including governments and intergovernmental organizations, that the complexity of Internet governance does not allow the leadership of a single class of actors, but rather requires decentralized, bottom-up, inclusive policy development, and decision-making processes with the collaboration of all affected parties (Doria 2014; Kleinwächter 2011; Zingales and Radu 2015; Chenou and Radu 2014).
Nevertheless, the WSIS produced no substantial changes concerning the concrete mechanisms of governance. ICANN maintained its role in the DNS management and the questions of its jurisdiction and its special relationship with the USA were not mentioned in the final document.
The greater institutional innovation was the establishment of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), designed as a “forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue” to be held every year for a period of five years (then renewed in 2005 and 2010). As paragraph 77 of the Tunis Agenda clarifies, the IGF “would not replace existing arrangements, mechanisms, institutions or organizations, but would involve them and take advantage of their expertise. It would be constituted as a neutral, non-duplicative and nonbinding process. It would have no involvement in day-to-day or technical operations of the Internet” (WSIS 2005). As noted, the creation of the IGF was “the kind of agreement that could get the WSIS out of its impasse; it allowed the critics to continue raising their issues in an official forum, but as a nonbinding discussion arena, could not do much harm to those interested in preserving the status quo” (Mueller 2010: 78; see also Becker 2019).
By and large, the outcomes of the WSIS process resulted in a compromise between incompatible views (Mansell 2007; Musiani and Pohle 2014; Raymond and DeNardis 2015), which did not produce a synthesis. As noted, “rather than cutting short the issues, the WSIS promoted further dialogue” (Chenou and Radu 2014: 8).
It should be noted that the ambiguous results of the WSIS led to the equally ambiguous development of multistakeholderism within the Internet governance ecosystem. Following the WSIS, the concept and practices of multistakeholder governance have rapidly spread across many Internet governance contexts, and a large number of Internet-related organizations, arenas, and processes started to describe themselves as multistakeholder (Chenou and Radu 2014; Doria 2014; Raymond and DeNardis 2015). This is largely because multistakeholder processes provide some guiding principles and common understandings in a chaotic and fragmented policy domain fraught with tensi...