The public funding for the Vox Internet II research program has ended on May 6, 2010. In order to continue the exchanges on Internet regulation and its relationship with the "dynamics of the commons", we invite you to follow us on the research platform Hypotheses at: www.hypotheses- voxinternet.fr. It will be available on September 2010.
In the meantime, you will find below a summary outlining the issues developed by the Vox Internet network and a set of conclusions that open avenues for future research.

VOX INTERNET FINAL REPORT SUMMARY

Internet Governance : Towards a Democratic Building of Norms Frameworks, Principles and Instruments.

What is Internet governance? How is it carried out, what are its limits and evolutionary perspectives?

The debates publicized within the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS, organised between 2003 and 2005 under the auspices of the United Nations Organisation), have put the political question of global Internet governance into the spotlight. Although attempting to give a consensual definition [1] , the WSIS conclusions did not allow to take any decision about the priorities, means, kinds of partnership and instruments for deliberation and regulation. Then, the UN created a new informal body, the Internet Governance Forum, whose mission is to further investigate, through a multistakeholder dialogue between governments, international organizations, business players and civil society, a set of five issues : openness, access, diversity, security, critical internet resources – that each category understands according to its corporate interests.
The Vox Internet project, initiated in 2003, has held as its primary objective to create Internet governance as an innovative research question in France and in Europe, necessary to flesh out and evaluate the role of information and communication technologies for the evolution of our societies. The main question was : is it possible to go beyond the “official” definition in order to build a more coherent, efficient and equitable Internet Governance pattern ? On one side, Vox Internet tried to analyse and categorize the causes and consequences of the legal evolutions embedded in Internet Governance debates; on the other side, the programme has endeavoured to analyse three sources of contemporary normativity, complementary to the law: the technical architecture of the Internet, the realm of networked social practices, and the evolutions of economical models in what is labelled as the “Information Society”.
The main questions we investigated are the following:
• What are the current available analytical frameworks, and how do they help our understanding of standardisation processes, of management, and of appropriation of the Internet?
• On what general principles could be built improvements of existing governance instruments, or the creation of new instruments?
• Are current technical developments (Internet of Things, digital convergence, and so on) suitable to counter, rather than favor, the democratic evolution of Internet governance?

The construction of an open, interdisciplinary and European network around an emerging field and issue.

Relying on an overwhelmingly North-American literature to begin with, the programme has set its goals on identifying and promote the contribution of French, French-speaking and European researchers; moreover, beyond a mere catalogue of contributors and themes, Vox Internet has sought the emergence of a specific theoretical framework.
The need for an interdisciplinary approach, and the co-existence of multiple sources of expertise, tied with the fast pace of the Internet’s expansion – from the point of view of both technical development and mundane or experts uses – have led to a threefold research attitude:
• An open theoretical standing, able to take into account and make the best use of outputs from different disciplines in Social and Human Sciences (SHS), not targeted strictly on the project’s main themes but having the potential of fuelling its main questionings;
• The construction of a community of researchers inclusive of SHS and Information and Communication Technologies Sciences, able to investigate common hypotheses and to build shared (although provisional) conclusions;
• An effort for constantly maintaining scientific rigor so as to release the “Internet governance” research issue from the moving and ambiguous evolution of the debates surrounding the Internet in general.

Scientific activities and results

The Vox Internet II programme has organised, or co-organised, ten scientific international symposiums and four French or French-speaking events, all interdisciplinary. Together with the internal monthly seminar, this activity has led to the production of an important number of publications. The networked model adopted for the researchers’ engagement (rather than an institutionalised, static team) and the open communication surrounding our activities have been conceived so as to introduce the “Internet governance” topic to colleagues from diverse disciplinary fields.
Dissemination on a “democratic governance of the Internet in-the-making” has been largely pursued within the educational realm (student seminars, meetings with representatives of the Ministry of Education, lectures to secondary school students), but also outside the academic world (professional associations, civil society, public policy decision-makers, media), in France and beyond. The bilingual Web portal has been particularly helpful in this regard.
After a work of several years, we have reached the following main conclusions:
• a more nuanced understanding of the Internet’s functioning, as a socio-technical system that is at once unique and multiple; centralised and decentralised; characterised by normative pluralism; a revealing force, disruptive and producing rules at the same time.
• the necessity of combining a procedural with a substantial conception of governance, because on one hand, the weak level of attention paid to the materiality of organizational arrangements entails the a priori over-estimation of their openness’ political impact; on the other hand, the absence of criteria for assessing their legitimacy and accountability significantly impacts the effectiveness of venues for multistakeholder dialogue.
• the validation of hypotheses concerning the modalities of democratic construction of Internet regulation:

  . articulate the pluralism of rules, as an answer to the plurality of norms and to this aim combine governance and law;

  .repoliticize the meaning of the word « governance », by prioritizing "local" practices while facing the difficulties of founding a "global governance" regime, and by giving to the openness principle the status of "golden rule" for the network of networks;

  . consider access to information and culture, and the dignity of human beings, the first among basic rights;

  . adopt an ethical perspective, allowing to treat the Internet as an "informational common good", and look forward the adoption of a communication right able to take fully into account cultural diversity.

In the last phases of the project, a consensus was reached on the formulation of a dynamic conception of Internet governance, "the common management of a common good", that can be understood both as an intermediate result and as a new research direction.

Even if the programme has now reached the end of its funding by the National Agency of Research, all those who have been associated with it are certainly going to build upon its contributions in further research programmes and subsequent endeavours.

Let all the people who supported and appreciated our works be given special thanks.