Like it or not, governments are fundamentally opposed to the open nature of
'the Internet', and they always will be (even the 'reasonable' ones).
Managing information flow is how they derive and exercise power
Aside from the whole "consent of the governed" issue, this perspective seems historically fairly short-sighted. Fox's "History in Geographic Perspective: the other France" lays out a fairly well-documented case for modeling the trade networks of a country in geographic terms. Some of those are easily controlled by a nation states, river tolls being a great example. Others are not: the trade of ocean-going vessels left national control then as now. This set up an international network that had enormous economic and cultural influences during the period he describes (port city cultures in different trading nations often looked a lot closer to each other than to the culture of the towns of the interior, for example).
Yes, there were treaty-based efforts to set some common understandings. Some of those were quite useful, but whenever they actually impinged on workings of the real network you got smuggling. In some cases, lots and lots of it, with encouragement from some of the participating nations. In other words, some countries tried to control their participants in these international networks very tightly. Some were content to let their merchants get fat off it instead. There was no universal response.
I suspect someone much brighter than I am could write a similar analysis for the Internet. The network has changed what the boundaries are from the traditional geographic boundaries of river basin, port, and railroad gauge to a set of topologies instantiated in fiber networks and interconnects. Where the network is entirely under the control of a nation-state, it will find it easy to exercise sovereignty (whatever its reasons for doing so). But it is very clear that this is not the only case. *Whenever* the value the network provides is derived from interconnects outside a single nation's borders, that sovereignty is much harder to assert (or even assess). When the topology is relatively changeable, it is also hard to use bilateral agreements to manage the relationship--when traffic from Den Haag can move to Paris via the LINX instead of AMS-IX in an instant, a Dutch-French bilateral agreement just doesn't do the trick. It is even trickier when the traffic from Den Haag to Haarlem goes via the LINX.
In this new effort at a multilateral framework, we are seeing a clash between a desire for sovereign control of the Internet and a desire to reap the benefits of open participation. I think our role in that is to make sure all involved understand: the benefits of the Internet's network effect; the risks in allowing nations through which traffic passes to assert sovereignty over the flows, especially given both the pace and chance of topological change; and the reality that entities outside of governments control the paths that packets actual traverse.
That we already have some government who understand that is a good start, but we have to keep working at it to avoid damage we can't route round. I personally want to thank Lynn and the Internet Society staff for all their advocacy, as well as those IETF participants who were at WCIT with national delegations. It is, of necessity, arduous work, but well worth both the effort and the thanks of our community.
regards,
Ted Hardie