A Legal Lens into Internet Governance

Abstract

In the field of Internet governance, the fast-changing technological and political environment challenges the suitability of traditional regulatory regimes; this assessment is justified even if the emphatic pronouncements in John Perry Barlow's (1996) Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace have turned out to be not realistic. The dichotomy between the global reach of the infrastructure and the national embedment of the normative framework occasions the need for new legal research concepts and methods. Issues such as legitimacy, regulatory quality, technical standardization, and accountability are to be addressed (Weber 2016a). As I show in this chapter, legal scholars need to tackle these challenges.Traditionally, the legal order was based on a communal, later on a national, normative framework that was complemented by self-regulatory instruments and, since the 19th century, partly by multilateral agreements. This regulatory framework, developed for the real world, is exposed to limitations if applied to the online world designed by the new information technologies. Therefore, the traditional understanding of political structures as command by a specific body that induces people to execute certain actions-in the sense that people think about what to choose and what to do-should be replaced in the Internet governance context by a more inclusive approach. Before discussing the details of such an approach, I outline some basic principles of legal theory and the relevant guiding regulatory strategies for Internet governance.