ABSTRACT
This chapter develops a polycentric perspective on global data governance concerning the data that ‘flow’ across the Internet and its implications for interoperability. This exercise is undertaken to bring some legibility to the currently (seemingly) disconnected array of themes, actors, and levels using data flows to affect the Internet’s interoperability, consciously or unconsciously. The work examines the different centers of decision-making and practices concerning data against a polycentric governance framework that addresses seven attributes: transscalarity, transsectorality, diffusion, fluidity, overlapping mandates, ambiguous hierarchies, and no final arbiter. These disparate arrangements are then examined by connecting the different systemic organizing forces of polycentric data governance flows that shape daily the Internet. This case underscores the polycentric configuration of data governance flows, its embeddedness in the technical and institutional features of the Internet, and the struggles for centralization and decentralization between different state and non-state actors.
