IOs and the Transforming Global Internet Policy Architectures: From Discourse to Concepts to Instruments

Abstract Ten years ago, the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) adopted the concept of Internet governance (IG) and formalized its working definition of this process. In addition to giving it the widest substantive dimension, encompassing any and all normative issues related to the online environment, the WSIS defined the main actors involved in the Internet governance process, namely governments, the private sector and civil society. However, Intergovernmental Organizations (IOs), whether regional (such as the OECD or the Council of Europe) or global (such as some UN agencies like the ITU and UNESCO), also are crafting roles for themselves as stakeholders. Underlining the need for their invaluable experience, capacity and mandate to co-elaborate binding and non binding standards, they have been trying -with varying degrees of success -to establish themselves as the appropriate settings to deal with the crossborder nature of the network in an effective way. With a particular focus on a regional organization (the Council of Europe or CoE) and a global UN agency (the UNESCO), explored through a set of interviews of their key leaders and personnel and through the analysis of their main produced outcomes, this paper identifies and assesses the role IOs have been playing in the development of global Internet policy network architectures, through their own actions and outcomes, as well as through their interactions with other stakeholders