ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of the state in governance of global internet infrastructure at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). We first consider general questions of state involvement in multistakeholder governance of the internet at ICANN, with particular attention for the Government Advisory Committee. We then turn to the so-called Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) stewardship transition of 2014 to 2016, a process that saw formal oversight of certain critical internet resources pass from the US government to an “empowered community” of stakeholder representatives. The chapter analyses the extensive and often heated debates during the IANA transition around the role of the state in the multistakeholder model. We conclude that, post-transition, states still generally play a secondary role at ICANN and that this situation can have problematic implications for promotion of the (global) public interest in internet governance.
