THE THREE LAYERS OF DIGITAL GOVERNANCE MULTISTAKEHOLDER

COLLABORATIONS
Solutions to issues in each layer
No one person, government, organization, or company governs the digital infrastructure, economy, or society. Digital governance is achieved include policies, best practices,
standards, and specifications
through the collaborations of Multistakeholder experts acting through polycentric communities, institutions, and platforms across national,
developed by the collaborations
regional, and global spheres. Digital Governance may be stratified into three layers to address infrastructure, economic, and societal issues of expert stakeholders from
with solutions. For a map of Digital Governance Issues and Solutions across all three layers, visit https://map.netmundial.org actors in business, government,
academia, technical, and
civil society.

LAWS, POLICIES, AND INDUSTRY AND TRADE NEWS AND USERS EDUCATION APPLICATIONS KEY GOVERNANCE ACTORS
REGULATIONS Manufacturing, retail, supply chain/logistics, INFORMATION There are over 3 billion users Online universities, World wide web, • IGF
Governing bodies in local, national, regional, healthcare, finance, etc. Newspapers, broadcast, worldwide. Most users connect to the research, tutorials, email, cloud, VoIP, • Technical Organizations
and international spheres are engaged with Such as Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, Rakutan, Sony, personal & professional blogs, Internet through their mobile phone. classroom engagement. mobile apps. (ISOC, W3C,...)
their citizens and with other bodies to develop Toyota, Coca-Cola, Boeing, Alcatel-Lucent social media. • NETmundial
and apply laws, policies, and/or regulations. The • World Economic Forum
transnational nature of the Internet must be OCEANIA ASIA NA EU AFR • National Governments
SOCIETAL LAYER
ECONOMIC AND

synchronized with the established International 1% 48% 22% 19% 10%

ENTERTAINMENT • Civil Society
system of governance and laws.
www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/#byregion Music, movies, television, games. • Intergovernmental
Such as iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Organizations (OECD,
Amazon, Netflix UNESCO,...)
• Law Enforcement
CIVIC AND HUMAN RIGHTS SOCIAL MEDIA SECURITY MOBILE Agencies
Privacy, identity, access to content, Sharing photos, videos, ideas Cybersecurity, cyber Smart phones, tablets,
freedom of expression, cybercrime, and information. warfare, cyber espionage, cars. There are now more
consumer protection, cultural Such as Facebook, Twitter, cyber terrorism, and mobile devices on the
diversity, and many more. Instagram, Tencent QQ, Whatsapp many more. planet than people.

NEWS 4
RIGHTS!

KEY GOVERNANCE ACTORS

ROOT SERVICES THE ROOT ZONE INTERNET IDENTIFIERS’ PUBLIC REGISTRIES
• ETSI
NAMES NUMBERS PROTOCOLS
12 organizations from 4 countries + + = NAMES NUMBERS PROTOCOLS • ICANN / IANA
LOGICAL LAYER

administering 13 different root • IETF

servers that provide top-level DNS
services via hundreds of machines
in dozens of countries.
~500 Anycast copies worldwide.
• ISO
• ITEE
• NRO
DOMAIN NAMES IP ADDRESSES PROTOCOL PARAMETERS • TLD Operators
~300 Country Code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs) such as .fr, .br, .us, ... IPv4: More than 4 billion addresses. Protocol parameters are the commands and identifiers that are used • W3C
~600+ Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) such as .com, .biz, .realtor, ... IPv6: 340 undecillion (trillion, trillion, trillion) addresses. inside protocols, the structured communications used for the web,
5 Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) who coordinate email, etc., to transfer the information.
~1500+ Domain Name Registrars such as GoDaddy, Network Solutions, Register,
policy related to Internet address resources. These parameters are used in standards defined by the IETF in coordination with
... other standard organizations such as the W3C. e.g. TCP/IP, VoIP, HTTP, HTTPS.

THE INTERNET BACKBONE (IP NETWORKS) 90% is privately owned by global companies like: Level 3 Communications, TeliaSonera International Carrier, CenturyLink, Vodafone, Verizon, Sprint, AT&T
INFRASTRUCTURE

KEY GOVERNANCE ACTORS

• GSMA
INTERNET TERRESTRIAL UNDERSEA CABLES SATELLITES WIRELESS SYSTEMS • IEEE
LAYER

EXCHANGE CABLES ~300 cables that ~2000 communications ~824,000 wireless • IETF
POINTS (IXP) transmit 99% of all satellites in use, towers worldwide. • ITU
~550 points international many used now for • National ICT Ministries
worldwide. Internet data. Internet data. • Network Operator Groups

For public use. Designed by XPLANE, in assignment by ICANN. v1.0 • 3 August 2015 2015 | Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial
THE LOGICAL LAYER OF DIGITAL GOVERNANCE TECHNICAL OPERATIONS
The technical operating community is made up of multiple independent actors bound
Layered on top of the Physical Infrastructure's thousands of networks and satellites, the Internet's Logical Infrastructure is what delivers by common principles and mutual commitments that ensure the security and stability
One Internet for the world through Unique Identifiers (Names, Numbers, and Protocol Parameters). ICANN coordinates the administration of the Internet Infrastructure. Each actor's community develops policies and standards
of this layer in partnership with other technical communities to ensure the security, stability, resiliency, and integrity of this critical layer. in an open, inclusive, and consensus-based approach.

MULTISTAKEHOLDER
KEY GOVERNANCE ACTORS COMMUNITY
ECONOMIC
AND SOCIETAL ICANN Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers Academic
LAYER Helps coordinate the Internet's systems of unique identifiers including • Institutions of higher
domain names and IP addresses, as well as manages the IETF's protocol learning
NEWS 4
RIG HTS! parameter registries. • Academic thought
www.icann.org leaders
IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, is a set of functions • Professors & students
MULTISTAKEHOLDER

housed and operated within ICANN. It acts as the top-level allocator for
blocks of IP addresses and AS numbers, proposes creation of and Business
COMMUNITY

ACADEMIC BUSINESS CIVIL SOCIETY GOVERNMENT INTERNET USERS TECHNICAL

changes to DNS top-level domains, and manages lists of unique • Private-sector
identifiers used in Internet protocols. companies from
www.iana.org across industries
• Industry and trade
IETF Internet Engineering Task Force associations
Develops and promotes a wide range of Internet standards dealing in
particular with standards of the Internet protocol suite. Their technical Civil Society
documents influence the way people design, use, and manage the • International
Internet. The IETF operates under the Internet Society (ISOC) with organizations
POLICY & IMPLEMENTATION

architectural oversight provided by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB). • Non-governmental

POLICY, SPECIFICATIONS AND STANDARDS DEVELOPMENT
www.ietf.org organizations
• Non-profit
ISO International Organization for Standardization organizations
Standardizes, among many other things, the official names and
LOGICAL LAYER

• Think Tanks
postal codes of countries, dependent territories, special areas of
geographic significance. Government
THE ROOT ZONE IDENTIFIERS’ PUBLIC REGISTRIES
INTERNET www.iso.org
NAMES NUMBERS PROTOCOLS • National governments
+ + =
NUMBERS INTERNET
NAMES PROTOCOLS

NRO Number Resource Organization

• Distinct economies
recognized in
A coordinating body for the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). The international fora
RIRs manage the distribution of IP addresses and Autonomous System
• Multinational
Numbers in their regions of the world.
governmental and
www.nro.net
treaty organizations
AFRINIC www.afrinic.net LACNIC www.lacnic.net
• Intergovernmental
APNIC www.apnic.net RIPE NCC www.ripe.net
organizations
ARIN www.arin.net
KEY GOVERNANCE ACTORS

• Public authorities
Root Server IETF TLD Operators Top Level Domain Operators (with a direct interest

Operators
TLD Operators NRO (Housed in ISOC)
IANA ICANN Organizations which have been assigned the management of Top-Level in global Internet
Governance)
Domains such as: Generic TLDs (.com, .edu, .info, .name etc ...), Country
Code TLDs (.fr, .us, .gh, .cn etc...) and non-ASCII alphabet TLDs (in
language such as Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Russian, French etc...) Internet Users
—among others. • Private citizens
interested in regional
Other IP-Related
Standards Development Root Server Operators or global Internet
Organizations Governance
12 independent organisations operate the 13 authoritative name
(W3C, ETSI, etc...) servers (A through M) that serve the Domain Name System (DNS) root
Technical
zone. The name servers are a network of hundreds of physical servers
• Internet engineers
located in many countries around the world.
• Computer engineers
www.root-servers.org
• Software developers
THE INTERNET BACKBONE (IP NETWORKS) W3C • Network operators
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community
where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work
INFRASTRUCTURE INTERNET together to develop Web standards. W3C's mission is to lead the Web to
TERRESTRIAL UNDERSEA WIRELESS
LAYER EXCHANGE
CABLES CABLES
SATELLITES its full potential.
SYSTEMS
POINTS (IXP) www.w3.org

For public use. Designed by XPLANE, in assignment by ICANN. v1.0 • 3 August 2015 2015 | Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial