To achieve concrete policy objectives, however, Indian bureaucrats and civil society representatives will need to redouble efforts to ‘work on the inside’ and engage more closely with various Internet governance body mechanisms.

France has gone so far in the debate over .wine and .vin as to demand an overhaul of how ICANN is structured and run. TheFinancial Times reported over the weekend that Paris planned to call for an international "general assembly" to oversee ICANN with a "one country, one vote" policy at a meeting on Monday. The French have also said that proceeding with the domain names could "imperil" talks on a transatlantic trade deal between the EU and the U.S.

In April, a unique group of over 600 Internet founders, geeks, civil society advocates, government officials, corporate lobbyists, and academics gathered in São Paulo to debate the future of the Internet. Out of the discussion came the NetMundial Multistakeholder Agreement of Sao Paulo, a set of principles and road map for the future of Internet governance. Ostensibly catalyzed by Edward Snowden’s revelations of U.S.

Asked at a media forum in St. Petersburg about Russia’s largest search engine, Yandex, storing its data on servers outside the country, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the Internet was originally a "CIA project" and "is still developing as such."

For over a decade, the United States has promoted a free and open Internet as a central tenet of its foreign policy. To date, this has most visibly involved shaming governments that limit access to online content and developing tools that help individuals circumvent censorship and surveillance.

Earlier this month, the US Commerce Department announced a plan to back away from its last direct involvement in running the Internet. The man who made that decision, Lawrence Strickling, sees the government's role today as merely "clerical," but letting go of even that sends an important symbolic message: The Internet is all grown up now.

The National Telecommunications & Administration of the Department Commerce on Friday announced a plan to shift responsibility for overseeing the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to “the global multistakeholder community.”   This plan reflects a strong commitment to keeping the technical operations of the Internet in the hands of its nongovernmental community and out of the hands of governmental bodies.