Avri,

My hope is that the major civil society constituencies in this process can unite around opposition to any governance model based on a single global organization. After centuries of governance evolution this is not how governance is structured in other areas. Gravity is even more pervasive than is the Internet and we have not argued that traction is everywhere so we should have global governance of driving regulations :-)

In my meetings with students and others who respond with little knowledge and prior thought, they frequently innocently propose some “UN body” to govern the Internet using the simple argument that “somebody has to do something about this”, the “this” being everything from exploitation of children to government spying and commercial data mining.

The challenge here is to shift the discussion to deeper issues of how governance does and might work. Starting from the usual agreement that any governance should be democratic, and not authoritarian, the problem becomes immediately apparent.  Should global votes be weighted one country one vote, or weighted by population. With Tuvalu (pop 10,000) and China (pop 1363 million), China and large population countries would not agree to one country one vote. With China’s 1363 million and the U.S.’s 318 million, the U.S and small population countries would not agree to one person one vote. There is no basis here for agreement for a single multilateral global governance body.  

Governance of the Internet is likely to look more like the multi-polar and multi-leveled governance models that have evolved everywhere over time. That path to Internet governance structures is paved with more knowledgeable and engaged stakeholder constituencies, organizing as cohorts pursuing their respective objectives at several levels at the same time. Such it has always been and such it will always be, even in the virtual territories of the Internet, and such it will be in the long run no matter how this DNS transition rolls out in the short run.

Sam Lanfranco