The question of Internet governance is not raised directly by the ACTA petition, but nonetheless is one that presents great risks to the efficient function of the Internet itself. Indeed, ACTA's request that the FCC define the "permissible uses" of the Internet sounds very much like a call for governmental involvement in directing the appropriate functionalities made available on this new medium.
In some respects, the Internet and the PSTN are not that different in terms of governance. Both principally rely on private, consensus technical standards; both utilize independent, non-governmental organizations for numbering administration; and both require inter-governmental cooperation for international communications. The real difference is who sets policy. For the PSTN, policy has traditionally been the province of the FCC and its PTT equivalents overseas. On the Internet, on the other hand, policy is established on a decentralized basis by the Internet community itself, through organizations such as the World Wide Web consortium.
The decentralized, non-governmental nature of Internet governance may be in for a challenge in the near-term. Recent initiatives at the White House and the Patent & Trademark Office indicate that the government is looking closely at competitive and intellectual property issues arising in domain name assignment -- for which disputes are increasingly ending up in court. Whether the Internet community can resist calls for governmental oversight of domain name and related "competitive" issues on the increasingly commercial Internet remains to be seen.
