Internet Governance (IG) was consolidated as a regulatory field in the late-1990s, when the U.S. government authorized the creation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to manage key address resources in public interest (Mueller, 2002; Antonova, 2008; Drake & Willson, 2008). To acquire legitimacy, the private international organization implemented an open and all-inclusive multistakeholder (MSH) process of decision making, which has become since then the “trademark” of the Internet Governance field. The U.N.-affiliated global Internet Governance Forum (IGF), since 2006, has broadened the issue-field by including in the discussion agenda such issues as human rights, net neutrality, and access to the Internet.
In that context, national and regional formal and informal forums have been established in the Asia and Pacific region in the last years, as part of Internet Governance regionalization process. They have both adopted the MSH collaborative discussion format of the global structures and broadened the participation to governments, businesses, the civil society, the academia, and other diverse stakeholder groups. In their capacity as vital links between the global and national levels, they are the structures, where key IG issues are identified, voices of marginalized local Internet user groups are heard, and knowledge/understanding is disseminated to local stakeholder groups.
This paper reports the results of a qualitative discourse analysis study focused on the regional and national IG collaborative structures in Asia (among them are the Asia-Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum, APrIGF; Japan IGF; India IGF; Bangladesh IGF), and the mechanisms and strategies of consensus-reaching, learning, and capacity-building used by them. The leading argument is that, despite the enormous diversity in the region, the collaborative IG forums facilitate the shaping of national regulatory regimes through sharing expertise, practices, and concerns, and through establishing formal and informal collaborative networks, which foster capacity-building in “shared power” governance.
