ABSTRACT
‘Transregionalism’ joins an expanding thesaurus entry alongside terms such as ‘translocal’, ‘transnational’, ‘transworld’, ‘transplanetary’, ‘transscalar’, ‘globalization’, ‘world society’, and more. Few contemporary developments manifest the deficiencies of ontological and methodological territorialism as starkly as the Internet. Born of the United States military in the 1960s and diffused across the wider society from the 1980s onwards, this arena of digital communication by 2017 linked 3.6 billion persons through more than 20 billion devices across the planet. A number of terminological innovations have attempted to capture the quality of ‘territorial-together-with-more-than-territorial’ space. Although the Internet substantially defies territorial geography, it does not mean that the planet-spanning realm of digital communications is unregulated. Cyberspace is not ‘free’, in the sense of lacking rules and ordering processes. Diverse rationales have driven the regionalization of Internet governance. However attractive regional options might often be, operation of a single global Internet also requires substantial measures of transplanetary governance.
