A free, open and secure digital society cannot develop without innovative governance mechanisms to address the dangers that threaten it.

A distributed institutional ecosystem was progressively developed for governance OF the internet^[1]. It efficiently enabled this unique creation of mankind to now serve more than half the world's population.

However, equivalent efforts were not devoted to developing the necessary policy-making tools for governance ON the internet, i.e. to organize its uses and mitigate in respect of human rights abuses it can allow.

As a result, we witness a legal arms race.

Uncoordinated unilateral measures are adopted under the pressure of urgency, governments increasingly exercise their authority extraterritorially, and company guidelines regulate online communities larger than most countries’ populations.

The resulting legal uncertainty, conflicts of laws and long-term unintended consequences could threaten the very benefits of the global network.

The history of institutions reflects the constant effort of mankind to organize itself in larger and larger communities. Enabling the coexistence of several billions of people connected through the internet is nothing short of a civilizational challenge.

Yet, our international system of territorially defined national jurisdictions was adapted to a world with few cross-border interactions. It is now challenged when transnational becomes the new normal.

The principle of non-interference and the strict separation of sovereignties also too often prevent the cooperation that is more necessary than ever to manage common digital spaces.

For the first time, online social applications reveal the social graphs mapping some of our complex individual connections. They also reflect the numerous^[2] and heterogeneous groups of all sizes and purposes that humans use to organize themselves, with public or private governance structures.

Our digitally interconnected world needs an approach reflecting this hypergraph^[3] structure of society beyond the mere paving of the earth's surface into 190+ separate nations states.

In particular, enabling all stakeholders to address their common challenges requires overcoming the longtime mistrust between states and non-state actors.

Neutral spaces are therefore needed for them to communicate, coordinate and jointly develop policy standards regarding internet uses and abuses.

Governance in cyberspace can only be built issue by issue, with joint agenda setting and policy development by all relevant stakeholders progressively fostering the mutual trust needed for implementation.

Inspiration in that regard can be drawn from the technical interoperability approach that enabled the distributed internet infrastructure we enjoy today.

In a context of increasing normative pluralism where public authorities and private actors concurrently set, implement and enforce norms according to their own internal institutional processes, legal interoperability can help achieve policy coherence and structure the increasingly direct interactions between these diverse actors across borders.

Protocols could make heterogeneous governance frameworks interoperable, like TCP/IP and HTML/HTTP respectively allowed the global internet and the World Wide Web to emerge out of heterogeneous networks and distributed databases.

The importance of fostering this legal interoperability was highlighted at the 3rd Global Conference of the Internet and Jurisdiction Policy Network^[4], which took place in Berlin on June 3-5, 2019, in partnership with the Government of Germany.

The Internet & Jurisdiction Policy Network explores how to apply this concept on three concrete and representative transnational issues: content moderation and restrictions, cross-border access to electronic evidence, and actions at the DNS level to address abuses.

The corresponding multistakeholder Contact Groups set up in 2018-19 produced Operational Approaches documents^[5] proposing voluntary operational norms, criteria and mechanisms to organize the mutual relationships and responsibilities between different categories of stakeholders.

The outcomes of the policy processes facilitated by the Contact Groups are open for implementation by any actor around the world, unilaterally or through mutual affirmation of commitments.

The concrete results of this collective effort demonstrate the benefits of dedicated thematic neutral spaces and innovative engagement procedures to collaboratively address transnational digital issues.

A governance protocol for the social hypergraph can reduce tensions and enable permission-less policy innovation to create the distributed institutional ecosystem for governance ON the internet that the world urgently needs.

This pioneering methodology could ultimately be replicated to help the progressive development of a global governance architecture that is as transnational and distributed as the internet itself.

This contribution is provided by the author on a personal basis and not on behalf of the participants in the Internet & Jurisdiction Policy Network or its Secretariat.

^[1] The complex network of institutions managing the technical architecture, including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), the root server operators, ICANN and the DNS Operators.

^[2] More than 600 million groups exist on Facebook alone.

^[3] For any set of individuals and entities, the collection of all groups (or sub-sets) connecting its members is called the hypergraph of that particular population. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergraph

^[4] See https://conference2019.internetjurisdiction.net

^[5] See https://www.internetjurisdiction.net/news/operational-approaches-documents-with-concrete-proposals-for-norms-criteria-and-mechanisms-released