Here is a pertinent extract from Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, which I'm currently reviewing (a bit late, I know) for the Journal of Information Technology and Politics.

Traditional cyberlaw frameworks tend to see the Net as an intriguing force for chaos that might as well have popped out of nowhere. It is too easy to then shift attention to the “issues raised” by the Net, usually by those threatened by it — whether incumbent technical-layer competitors like traditional telephony providers, or content-layer firms like record companies whose business models (and, to be sure, legally protected interests) are disrupted by it. Then the name of the game is seen to be coming up with the right law or policy by a government actor to address the issues. Such approaches can lead to useful, hard-nosed insights and suggestions, but they are structured to overlook the fact that the Net is quite literally what we make it.

The traditional approaches lead us in the direction of intergovernmental organizations and diplomatically styled talk-shop initiatives like the World Summit on the Information Society and its successor, the Internet Governance Forum, where “stakeholders” gather to express their views about Internet governance, which is now more fashionably known as “the creation of multi-stakeholder regimes.” Such efforts import from professional diplomacy the notion of process and unanimity above all. Their solution for the diffculties of individual state enforcement on the Net is a kind of negotiated intellectual harmony among participants at a self-conscious summit—complex regimes to be mapped out in a dialogue taking place at an endlessly long table, with a role for all to play. Such dialogues end either in bland consensus pronouncements or in final documents that are agreed upon only because the range of participants has been narrowed.

It is no surprise that this approach rarely gets to the nuts and bolts of designing new tools or grassroots initiatives to take on the problems it identifies. The Net and its issues sail blithely on regardless of the carefully worded communiqués that emerge from a parade of meetings and consultations. Stylized gatherings of concerned stakeholders are not inherently bad—much can come of dialogue among parties whose interests interconnect. Indeed, earlier in this book I called for a latter-day Manhattan Project to take on the most pressing problems facing the generative Internet. But the types of people that such a project requires are missing from the current round of “stakeholder governance” structures. Missing are the computer scientists and geeks who would rather be coding than attending receptions in Geneva and Tunis. Without them we too easily neglect the prospect that we could code new tools and protocols to facilitate social solutions — the way that the robots.txt of Chapter Nine has so far headed off what otherwise would have been yet another cyberlaw issue.