From multistakeholderism to digital sovereignty: Toward a new discursive order in internet governance?

Pohle, Julia; Santaniello, Mauro Article — Published Version From multistakeholderism to digital sovereignty: Toward a new discursive order in internet governance? Policy & Internet Provided in Cooperation with: WZB Berlin Social Science Center Suggested Citation: Pohle, Julia; Santaniello, Mauro (2024) : From multistakeholderism to digital sovereignty: Toward a new discursive order in internet governance?, Policy & Internet, ISSN 1944-2866, Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, Vol. 16, Iss. 4, pp. 672-691, https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.426 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/313538.2 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Received: 17 April 2024 | Accepted: 18 August 2024 DOI: 10.1002/poi3.426 RESEARCH ARTICLE From multistakeholderism to digital sovereignty: Toward a new discursive order in internet governance? Julia Pohle 1 |Mauro Santaniello 2 1 WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Berlin, Germany 2 Department of Management & Innovation Systems (DISA‐MIS), University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy Correspondence Mauro Santaniello, Department of Management & Innovation Systems (DISAMIS), University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy. Email: [email protected] Funding information Italian Ministry of University and Research, Grant/Award Number: Grant PRIN 2022KTTSBC; United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies Abstract Since the early 2000s, the multistakeholder governance approach has been the reference model for transnational internet governance, reaching far beyond the original field of technical coordination and standard‐setting. But over the last decade many countries, including democracies supportive of multistakeholderism, have adopted measures to strengthen their digital sovereignty. Thereby, they have been advancing discourses and practices that reinforce state power with regard to the digital and are often at odds with the multistakeholder model. This paper analyzes the emerging dialectic between multistakeholder internet governance and digital sovereignty by seeking to understand how the pursuit of digital sovereignty is increasingly challenging the hegemony of the multistakeholder discourse in internet governance. To this purpose, it reassesses the historical development of power struggles over the internet through the analytical lenses of the discourse coalition framework. After reconstructing how the multistakeholder discourse has emerged and institutionalized in the internet governance arena, the paper retraces the expansion of the digital sovereignty discourse, regarding both the actors promoting it and the narratives attached to it. It also identifies key motivations behind this discourse. Finally, the paper discusses whether the digital sovereignty discourse is emerging as a new discursive order in the internet governance field and draws attention to Policy Internet. 2024;16:672–691.672 | wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/poi3 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. © 2024 The Author(s). Policy & Internet published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Policy Studies Organization. conditions that could either support or weaken its emergence. KEYWORDS digital policy, digital sovereignty, discourse coalition, internet governance, multistakeholderism INTRODUCTION In October 2019, the German Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Berlin with a speech that surprised many in the audience. Hosted by Germany, the IGF 2019 was the 14th instance of this annual meeting, created by the United Nations as a multistakeholder discussion forum for all issues pertaining to the management and coordination of the internet, as well as its usages and services. Merkel emphasized the importance of multistakeholderism by stating that “all of us”—meaning civil society, business, the scientific community, as well as all governments—needed to work together to shape the internet's future, and warned of the risks related to “national interests” interfering with the free and open internet. But she also stressed the importance of retaining digital sovereignty (Merkel, 2019), a term that at the time had only started to structure the official communication of the European Union (EU) and the German government. With this speech, not only did Merkel build a surprising bridge between the preservation of multistakeholder processes in global internet governance on the one hand and the pursuit of digital sovereignty on the other—and thus between two discourses that appear almost diametrically opposed—but she also acknowledged that the concept of digital sovereignty is itself contested and that different governments may attach very different ideas to it: But it may be that we all have come to understand something different by that, even though we are using the same term. As I understand it, digital sovereignty does not mean protectionism, or that state authorities say what information can be disseminated—censorship, in other words; rather, it describes the ability both of individuals and of society to shape the digital transformation in a selfdetermined way. (Merkel, 2019) The quote clearly shows Merkel's awareness of the risks and tensions inherent in the emerging digital sovereignty discourse, most prominently that, by adhering to this new discourse, Germany would create an unwilling alliance with authoritarian countries who have long fought the dominance of multistakeholder internet governance processes. This article analyzes this political dialectic between multistakeholderism and digital sovereignty. Its main objective is to understand whether and how the pursuit of digital sovereignty is increasingly challenging the hegemony of narratives related to the multistakeholder approach in global internet governance. The latter approach, which found in the IGF one of its most prominent implementations, has been the reference model for transnational internet governance processes since the early 2000s. Multistakeholderism thereby refers to a set‐up in which different groups of state and nonstate actors come together to discuss and find consensus on issues that are usually cross‐border and whose coordination appears to go beyond the responsibility of established multilateral institutions. But similar to digital sovereignty, the multistakeholder discourse is characterized by a certain openness and vagueness, which allows different actors to attach different narratives and ideas to it. Thus, multistakeholderism serves as “an imaginary that provides meaning and regularity to POLICY & INTERNET | 673 a fragmented, disorderly world”(Hofmann, 2016, p. 30) and, in this function, has developed into an almost untouchable mantra for participants of global internet governance processes. Yet, over the last decade an increasing number of policy‐makers, including from democratic governments supportive of multistakeholderism, have adopted measures and plans to strengthen their digital sovereignty. Thereby, they have been advancing discourses and practices that reinforce state power with regard to the digital and are often at odds with the multistakeholder model. To understand how digital sovereignty efforts are challenging the multistakeholder discursive order, the article first illustrates the conceptual framework of the study, which draws upon an ideational approach to the study of transnational policy‐making. From this perspective, both multistakeholderism and digital sovereignty are conceived of as performative policy discourses, each one uttered by a specific group of actors, promoting a defined set of interests and practices, and relying on a distinctive ensemble of ideas and narratives about how to govern the digital sphere. Drawing on the existing research literature on internet governance and digital policy, the article then reconstructs how multistakeholderism emerged and gained the status of a dominant policy discourse in the internet governance arena, and how it became institutionalized over time. It further retraces how the digital sovereignty discourse expanded, both in terms of the actors promoting it and of its scope, and analyzes the common motivations that contributed to the structuration of the digital sovereignty discourse worldwide. Finally, the paper addresses whether the digital sovereignty discourse is emerging as a new discursive order in the internet governance field, and draws attention to conditions that could either support or weaken the emergence of a digital sovereignty discursive order as an alternative to multistakeholderism. ORDERING THROUGH DISCOURSE: AN IDEATIONAL APPROACH TO POLICY‐MAKING Over the past decades, academic interest in the role of ideas, narratives, and discourses in international politics and policy studies has been growing steadily. Rather than framing policy‐making in a neo‐positivist epistemology and describing it as a value‐free technical process, ideational approaches to policy‐making share a constructivist understanding of meaning‐making in politics. Policy‐makers construct a certain idea of reality by using words to describe and contextualize phenomena. By placing these phenomena in relationships to each other, they create and attribute meaning to the various aspects that are part of a particular discourse. This means that ideational approaches commonly take a relationalist, contextual, and, very often, historical perspective of the creation of meaning in politics as they believe that discourses influencing politics can only be construed, understood, and interpreted in their relation to others and within a particular context (Howarth & Torfing, 2005, p. 14). Furthermore, ideational perspectives on policy are based on the understanding that discourses are being productive and reproductive of what is defined by the discourses themselves. A particular discourse produces a certain worldview by defining what is perceived as reality or truth; it thereby excludes other, alternative interpretations. In return, stabilized in official policy texts and through practical implementation, the privileged worldview facilitates the production of meanings, which are in line with the initial discourse, and thus reproduces it. From such a perspective, a discourse is a set of rules about what can and cannot be said (Gasper & Apthorpe, 1996, p. 4). Policy discourse analysis also acknowledges the role of actors and their interests as well as the institutions in which they interact. Discourses do not simply appear, they are always proposed and promoted by actors who might or might not effectively use them to advance their interests. At the same time, political and economic interests are not unswayable 674 | POHLE and SANTANIELLO characteristics of policy actors but necessarily a reflection of more fundamental beliefs and ideas. Thus, by understanding policy discourse as the outcome of joint productions of meanings among various policy actors, its analysis cannot neglect the interplay of ideas, interests, and material political economy as well as their impact on the actors involved in the creation of policy discourse (Schmidt, 2012, p. 91). Moreover, interactions among policy actors do not take place in a vacuum, rather they are influenced by formal and informal institutions. They provide the context in which policy‐making takes place and determine the degree of openness that different actors display towards certain sorts of policy ideas (Jones, 2009, p. 13). Hence, institutions constrain and filter policy discourses since every new idea, concept, or narrative needs to be tailored to these institutions. But they also enable and facilitate the introduction of a discourse since they provide the conceptual or constitutional frame for actors to advance, exchange, and adopt new ideas and narratives. Among the authors who have developed this ideational perspective on policy‐making into a conceptual and methodological approach, this paper primarily builds on the work of Maarten Hajer who adapted the Foucauldian concept of “order of discourse”to the study of public policy‐making and combines the analysis of discourse with a focus on the actors and the institutions involved in the policy processes. Drawing on his framework, we understand a policy discourse to be a “specific ensemble of ideas, concepts, and categorizations that are produced, reproduced, and transformed in a particular set of practices and through which meaning is given to physical and social realities”(Hajer, 1995, p. 44). To connect the (re‐) production of discourses to the actors promoting them, we identify “discourse coalitions,” meaning a group of policy actors who share ideas over extended periods of time and who, thanks to their having joined forces, are able to convince other political actors, and eventually the public, of the necessity and appropriacy of a certain idea (Hajer, 1993). The particularity of a discourse coalition is that actors do not necessarily need to agree on everything or to coordinate their actions to build one. Neither do they need to share the same values or interests. Instead, by employing the same narratives and practices, these actors contribute—deliberately or unknowingly—to the emergence, reproduction, and assertiveness of a common discourse (Hajer, 1993). In addition, Hajer's framework allows us to describe the influence that policy discourses have beyond a limited group of actors. If a discourse coalition successfully promotes a particular discourse on a larger scale, it “starts to dominate the way a society conceptualizes the world.”In thiscase,wefaceaprocessof“discourse structuration”(Hajer, 1993,p.46).Further,whenthis discourse becomes even more dominant, it can “solidify into an institution, sometimes as organizational practices, sometimes as traditional ways of reasoning”(Hajer, 1993,p.46).Inthat case, we are witnessing a process of “discourse institutionalization,”which has even larger repercussions for the reproduction of the policy discourse and its underlying beliefs. Thus, following Foucault, Hajer also stresses the fact that, when a dominant discourse reaches a certain level of institutionalization, it starts working as an ordering device: Discourses imply prohibitions since they make it impossible to raise certain questions or argue certain cases; they imply exclusionary systems because they only authorize certain people to participate in a discourse; they come with discursive forms of internal discipline through which a discursive order is maintained; and finally there are also certain rules regarding the conditions under which a discourse can be drawn upon. (Hajer, 1995,p. 49) It is this particular effect that we mean by discursive order. But the concept of discursive order should not be understood as a static one. Rather, discursive orders are both the (always unstable) outcomes of discursive struggles, and the cognitive spaces within which different discourse coalitions keep on fighting over meanings and definitions. POLICY & INTERNET | 675 Studying the influence of particular discourses and how they developed into ordering devices that structure policy processes, shape institutions, and define power dynamics in the internet governance field has a long scholarly tradition. The next sections build on the existing research, including the empirical data, theory, and analysis developed in this branch of studies to outline the historical modalities through which the multistakeholder governance discourse, and more recently the digital sovereignty discourse, have been structured and institutionalized, with the latter now challenging the former in its function of an ordering device. MULTISTAKEHOLDERISM AS A DISCURSIVE ORDER IN GLOBAL INTERNET GOVERNANCE In what was then the newly‐emerging policy field of global internet governance, the multistakeholder discourse arose in the early 2000s as a compromise between two main discourse coalitions that were confronting each other in a debate over the control of the internet's Domain Name System (DNS). The issues at stake were the management and distribution of the internet's resources that ensure on a technical level the smooth functioning of the network, such as domain names, Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, and the root server system. The first discourse coalition was composed of the US government, the US private sector, and the technical community of computer scientists and engineers that had contributed to the development of the early internet. This coalition promoted a discourse based on a mix of libertarian and neoliberal narratives, advancing and supporting the ideas of private selfregulation and private‐led internet development (Chenou, 2014, p. 207). This first coalition was, in turn, already the outcome of a previous discursive struggle that had unfolded during the 1990s and is important for understanding how these actors' discourse relating to selfregulation was institutionalized in internet governance and continues to structure the policy field to this day. At its core, this discourse presents a story of success, unfolded along two main narratives contributed by two different groups of actors. The first narrative, mainly promoted by the US government, was about the origin of this success and told the story of a network built and popularized by private actors, a network whose fast development was facilitated by market mechanisms and loose government control. Accordingly, the actors behind this narrative argued that the internet's administration needed to be entrusted to private actors, with the US government playing an oversight role for national security purposes only (Goldsmith & Wu, 2006). The other narrative, mainly expressed by the technical community, described the ultimate destiny of the internet, that is, its unavoidable universality, the inseparable and inalienable value of interconnection, and the irresistibility of the free flow of information (Carpenter, 1996). Because of these presumed characteristics, this narrative claimed that the internet would require the creation of a new transnational system of governance, which had to be based on a set of apolitical policy principles like those that had been developed by the technical community and synthesized in the famous motto: “We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code” (Clark, 1992). These two narratives that complemented each other in the self‐governance discourse, shared an exceptionalist perspective on the internet and “cyberspace,”meaning the social space that was emerging on top of this infrastructure. As a digital, transnational, and decentralized networking technology, the internet—according to this belief—would transcend places and national borders. Consequently, it had to be considered as a new kind of virtual space, separated from the natural realm and from the geography of world politics; as such, it had to be irreconcilable with the idea of state‐based territorial sovereignty. This cyber‐ 676 | POHLE and SANTANIELLO exceptionalist belief in the uniqueness of the internet was heavily marked by a pragmatic brand of libertarianism that had already served as a major ideological influence on its technical development (Wu, 2010). Based on a strong distrust of established political decision‐making processes and institutions, the core of cyber‐libertarian convictions was that existing political structures would become obsolete with the expansion of digital networks. From this perspective, governments, as symbols of state power, had no place in the new virtual space because they could not exercise their authority there (Barlow, 1996). The exceptionalist ideas complemented the neoliberal ideology of the US government of the time: while it rejected the idea of an informal technical community running the internet independently of both state and business authorities, the Clinton‐Gore administration embraced cyber‐exceptionalism as a way to legitimize the creation of a new, ad hoc governance system for the internet. They also used it to justify the exclusion of intergovernmental mechanisms and arenas that had been previously established for the coordination of other transnational communication networks such as for telegraph, telephone, and satellites. In 1998, the US government and the community of internet technicians institutionalized their self‐governance discourse by creating a nonprofit corporation based in California, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which was charged with the administration of the DNS (Department of Commerce DOC, 1998). As soon as it was set up, ICANN and its role for internet governance started to be challenged by a new discourse coalition, which opposed the idea of self‐regulation. In large part, this coalition was made up of national governments (led by the BRICS countries, i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), international organizations, such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and in an initial phase also the EU. These actors, which have been labeled by scholars as sovereigntists (Flonk et al., 2020; Mueller, 2010), shared an internationalist discourse based on normative narratives. Unlike the ontological narratives of the self‐governance discourse about the origins, nature, and destiny of the internet, the internationalist narratives focused on its deontology and political status. Accordingly, most of these narratives emphasized the need for an intergovernmental management of the DNS, which had to be designed to provide a more legitimate regime and a better representation of global interests in the governance of a network that had spread well beyond the United States. In addition, the internationalist discourse coalition also assembled actors who were not explicitly aiming at an intergovernmental solution for the management of the DNS, but opposed an internet governance order too strongly influenced by technical and commercial concerns. Developing countries, for example, shared some narratives of the internationalist discourse to advocate for increased international responsibility in providing developmental aid to bridge the digital divide, support economic development, and prevent a technology‐driven exacerbation of existing historical disparities. A small group of civil society associations also supported parts of the internationalist discourse to stress the need for the democratization of internet governance and for the protection of universal human rights. The struggle between the self‐regulation coalition and the internationalist discourse coalitions crystallized into the UN‐hosted World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in the early 2000s. During WSIS, the self‐governance discourse coalition advanced the dystopian narrative of a threatening UN takeover of the internet and a consequent overregulation of digital innovation (Mueller, 2010, p. 75; Thumfart, 2022). The internationalist discourse coalition, instead, narrated the utopian future of a “new cooperation model” (European Commission, 2005) based on multilateral agreements and that would respect the “sovereign rights of countries”and “the sovereign equality of all States”(Brazil, 2003; Saudi Arabia, 2003), able to grant a fair and just redistribution of internet resources (Bangladesh, 2003; Cuba, 2003) as well as a democratization of internet governance (ALAI et al., 2022). From this discursive confrontation and the power struggle between coalitions, POLICY & INTERNET | 677 the multistakeholder approach emerged as a compromise that would allow the various actors to develop a common understanding of the governance problems they were facing, and at the same time continue to struggle for their definitions and meanings. After having emerged about a decade earlier, the idea of multistakeholderism had gained popularity as an approach to bridge state and nonstate participation in transnational policy domains thanks to several UN summits (Hofmann, 2016, p. 31). Promising a way to develop longlasting, albeit nonbinding rules and standards in a consensual manner, the multistakeholder discourse in the emerging internet governance field was grounded on a pragmatic agreement between the opposing two coalitions, as well as on a widely‐shared belief. The agreement consisted in the separation between two governance layers: On the one hand, the day‐to‐day operations that keep the internet running and that should be entrusted to businesses and noncommercial operators that were already managing the basic functions of the network, for example, within ICANN. On the other hand, issues related to the interplay of digital networks and technologies with society were recognized as public policy concerns, in which national governments could legitimately have a role (WSIS, 2005, art. 35). Although it was substantially in favor of the self‐regulation discourse coalition and the status quo that it defended, the recognition of a public policy space in internet governance made the multistakeholder compromise acceptable for the internationalist discourse coalition, which saw this space as a viable field for future political struggles. Within the 3‐year timespan of WSIS, (2003–2005), the multistakeholder discourse not only took root in the official—and near‐infinitely quoted—definition of what is meant by internet governance 1 but also became hegemonic beyond the WSIS participants. It successfully constructed a common belief about the uniqueness of the internet and its global and inseparable nature. The uncontested idea of a universal internet was indeed a stratification of all the previous dominant narratives: the cyber‐exceptionalism of the libertarian discourse, the globalism of the neoliberal discourse, and the multilateralism of the internationalist discourse. The multistakeholder discourse also started to structure the field through new narratives of multistakeholderism as a facilitator of policy dialogues based on principles of open and egalitarian participation, diversity, and bottom‐up stakeholder engagement (Hofmann, 2016, p. 30). In addition, it was institutionalized in a multilevel polycentric web of forums and organizations, most prominently the IGF, created in 2005 to continue WSIS debates on a yearly basis. None of these bodies, according to the principle of separation, was intended to replace ICANN in controlling the DNS, nor to produce binding decisions. Yet, multistakeholderism turned into such a “teleological goal for Internet governance” (DeNardis & Raymond, 2013, p. 2) that even many existing internet‐related organizations, including ICANN, started to define themselves as multistakeholder institutions (Chenou & Radu, 2014). As a result, over the years, the concepts of internet governance and multistakeholder governance became almost synonymous (Carr, 2015, p. 641). If we can assume that, within a given policy domain, the highest ordering capacity of a discourse occurs when it is able to define the entire domain and its social actors, then at the end of the 2010s, the multistakeholder discourse was without any doubt the dominant ordering device of internet governance. As such, it served as a legitimizing discourse able to generate rule compliance without state coercion (Palladino & Santaniello, 2021). However, despite being able to unite several discourse coalitions and being institutionalized so successfully in the field, the discursive order of multistakeholderism remained controversial. In other words, it did not extinguish controversies, but rather channeled them into an institutional framework defined by discursive rules and routine practices. A major source of conflict remained the fact that the multistakeholder discourse continued to undermine established institutions, replacing government‐dominated international bodies with the principle of transnationalism. In the logic of the new discursive order, coordination by intergovernmental organizations would be an obstacle to the global nature and development 678 | POHLE and SANTANIELLO of the internet due to diverging national objectives and the short‐sighted, selfish interests of some states. Conversely, representatives of some states continued to insist on their demands that internet governance processes and the authority to make binding decisions be put in the hands of multilateral institutions and hence be more heavily subjected to state control (Ebert & Maurer, 2013, p. 1063; Musiani & Pohle, 2014). In sum, we define the multistakeholder discursive order as a policy discourse, which emerged in the field of internet governance in the early 2000s, became hegemonic and fully institutionalized throughout the first decade of the century, and shaped the global politics of internet governance at least until the end of the 2010s. From this perspective, multistakeholderism has not simply become “a proxy for broader political struggles”(DeNardis & Raymond, 2013, p. 2); it has also provided a discursive space where different discourse coalitions have been in mutual competition, with narrative resources being utilized in the struggle over the control of definitions and meanings (Santaniello & Palladino, 2022). The critical positions have largely focused on the actual implementations and outcomes of multistakeholderism, but—for many years—did not question the boundaries nor the basic rules of the game within this space of contention. As a matter of fact, eventually multistakeholderism was even embraced by the main alternative institution to ICANN, that is, the ITU. National governments and intergovernmental organizations have also become key actors of multistakeholder institutions, regularly participating in the IGF with their representatives. The capacity of the multistakeholder discursive order to assimilate and accommodate different discourse coalitions turned it into a space in which different narratives—that have become dominant at different times—became layered into a complex sediment of definitions and meanings (Figure 1). DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY: THE EXPANSION OF A POLICY DISCOURSE AND ITS REASONS States have always sought, and often succeeded in, both territorializing the digital space and shaping digital networks and digital services, be it through legal or practical measures or by providing the regulatory framework to guide the behavior and growth of other stakeholders (Mazzucato, 2013). For many years now, both authoritarian and democratic states have monitored, controlled, and censored the exchange of communication and data via the internet within a particular country or region, for example to suppress defamatory statements and dissident opinions, to protect intellectual property rights, or to counter disinformation and illegal activities. In addition, by regulating the conditions under which digital service providers can operate across borders, states have also found ways to exercise their power without subjecting the digital sphere to territorial sovereignty (Burri, 2017; Celeste, 2021, p. 5). Thus, the cyber‐libertarian belief that states would have little or no authority over the internet and its users—a narrative that, as we have argued, strongly influenced selfregulatory and, subsequently, multistakeholder discourses—seems to have outlived its validity. From today's perspective, digital networks are perceived as a challenge, not a barrier to the exercising of state power. The idea of digital sovereignty—which has gained so much attention lately—needs to be seen in the context of asserting state authority over the internet. However, in its manifold variations, the digital sovereignty discourse goes far beyond confirming and enforcing interventions by nation states in the digital space. The first and most prominent actor to call for more national sovereignty in digital matters was the Chinese government, which had been promoting both the preservation of territorial borders and the recognition of national governments as the dominant regulatory bodies since the early days of the global internet. In a 2010 white paper, it structured these various claims in the form of a strategy that seeks to POLICY & INTERNET | 679 The third set of conditions refers to ongoing political dynamics within the internet governance field itself: Over the last decade or so, multistakeholder internet governance has been experiencing growing internal conflicts caused by increasingly obvious problems of coordination and the multiplication of policy venues. Since WSIS, numerous processes and initiatives have emerged that claim to advance multistakeholder internet governance, ranging from various UN‐mandated workinggroupstohigh‐level events initiated by members of the internet governance community, such as the Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance (NETmundial). The resulting diversity and simultaneity of processes, which often overlap in terms of the issues covered and persons involved, cause frustration among participants and observers. While this has the effect of reducing both the shared beliefs and the commitment that characterized the early community of internet governance actors, it also makes space for those who criticize multistakeholder processes for lacking transparency, representativeness, and enforceable outcomes (Santaniello, 2021). At the same time, there is a growing importance for negotiation processes that take place in policy venues outside of the IGF and other traditional multistakeholder institutions. Some examples of this venue‐shifting are newly‐created forums that claim to use a multistakeholder format, such as the World Internet Conference (WIC), organized since 2014 by the Chinese government as an annual conference aiming at creating a new policy debate on internet governance revolving around the concept of cyber sovereignty. Meanwhile, established intergovernmental organizations such as the UN, the ITU and UNESCO regularly host conferences and conduct consultation processes under the official label of multistakeholderism, with the preparation of the “Global Digital Compact,”which is to be agreed upon during the UN Summit of the Future in September 2024, bearing witness to this trend. These kinds of processes, that involve input by nonstate actors without employing other principles such as bottom‐up consensusbuilding and transparent decision‐making, contribute to the multistakeholder principle being expanded to processes in which it is only governments who decide upon the final outcomes. But they also add to the acceptance of intergovernmental organizations as official venues for global digital policy‐making. Thus, they also give ground to initiatives such as the Chinese proposal for a new Internet Protocol, which has worried many—not only because of its planned technical features, but because it was initially proposed at the ITU in 2018 and not in the context of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), where new standards and protocols have been discussed and approved since the early days of the internet (Taylor et al., 2023). While the high attention paid to these new venues further challenges the multistakeholder discursive order, their focus on state authority also leads to resistance and renunciation by those actors who are torn between their ambitions for digital sovereignty and their longstanding support of multistakeholderism. The fourth set of conditions is related to the changing borders of the policy field, and particularly to the rise of the concept of “digital governance”as something distinct from “internet governance.”Today, digital sovereignty discourses no longer focus primarily on the internet as the dominant digital networking technology. Instead, they have a much broader scope, reaching into policy fields that have always been more national than transnational. Measures designed to enhance the digital sovereignty of states and national economies may be part of economic, industrial, and security strategies that go far beyond the internet, targeting the digital transformation of entire sectors of the economy and society at large. For instance, digital sovereignty policies very often seek to enhance innovation and competition regarding key technologies of the future, such as artificial intelligence. Moreover, in democratic countries, digital sovereignty efforts also cover the promotion of digital competences and decision‐making capacities of individuals in their roles as employees, consumers, and users of digital technologies and services (Pohle & Thiel, 2020). Thus, the discourse on sovereignty—like the entire debate on (national) digital policy—is increasingly moving away from the rhetoric of networks with its focus on decentralization and transnational coordination, thus even further endangering the consistency of the multistakeholder discursive order. A possible consequence of this shift is that actors who traditionally support 686 | POHLE and SANTANIELLO multistakeholder internet governance, for example, the EU and Brazil, may stay loyal to the multistakeholder order as far as the management of the DNS is concerned, but may, at the same time, contribute to the institutionalization of the digital sovereignty discourse elsewhere. This outcome would reduce the scope of multistakeholderism to technical coordination only, while most public policy issues would be reframed within a sovereigntist perspective—thereby reverting the thematic expansion of the internet governance field that occurred during WSIS. Moreover, considering that the multistakeholder discourse, compared with the digital sovereignty discourse, is more focused on decision‐making procedures rather than the production of substantial results, there is the theoretical possibility of a new order emerging from the convergence between the two discourses. Especially in democratic regimes, like the EU, such a convergence could lead to a situation in which deliberation follows the principles of multistakeholderism (open consultations, representation of interests, etc.), while results are codified into sovereign acts like public policies, regulations, and laws, all decided upon by governments. Finally, it seems that the survival of the multistakeholder discursive order is more and more dependent on the capacity of the current mechanisms for technical coordination to work properly in ensuring the uniqueness and functioning of the internet. Indeed, although there is currently regulatory and economic fragmentation in digital global governance, no fragmentation on the technical level has occurred, and there is little indication that countries will try to break the interoperability of the various networks that make up the internet (Mueller, 2017; Pohle & Voelsen, 2022). In conclusion, the possibility that the digital sovereignty discourse coalition can challenge and replace the multistakeholder discursive order is still to be tested in practice. Several interrelated factors will determine the outcome of this process. At the moment, the only certain thing is that the future of the internet, as well as its interplay with political regimes worldwide, is dependent on a multifaceted political struggle mainly conducted through the means of discursive and epistemic resources, such as narratives, definitions, and knowledge production. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Mauro Santaniello's work on this research was supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR) [Grant PRIN 2022KTTSBC—Digital Sovereignty in Comparative Perspective: State Authority, Corporate Power and Fundamental Rights in Cyberspace], and by the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU‐CRIS). Open access publishing facilitated by Universita degli Studi di Salerno, as part of the Wiley ‐CRUI‐CARE agreement. 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