The workshop on Legal Aspects explored the dynamic between the development of national law, international law, as also private transnational law, as they attempt to govern Internet-related public policy issues. As the moderator observed, although the early days of the study of Internet governance focussed on the borderless nature of cyberspace, in fact borders do impinge on the Internet and hence it is necessary to consider governance institutions at each level to gain a complete picture of Internet governance.

Jim Dempsey began by placing the main organisations that are "doing" Internet governance against the axes of international to local, and from non-governmental to private governance mechanisms. He gave two examples of policy decisions at the national level that may have huge implications for Internet access. The first was the decision of US telecommunications providers to offer flat-rate local calls, which was a model subsequently adopted in many European countries. The second was the allocation of unlicensed telecommunications spectrum in many countries, which has allowed Wi-Fi technology to boom in those countries.

Justice Hanne Sophie Greve then spoke on the sources of international law as set out in Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice: international conventions, international custom, general principles of law, and judicial decisions and scholarly teachings. She focused on the second and third of these, saying that it can be taken for granted that human rights principles have become customary international law, and that this extends to the Internet.

The next speaker, Kristine Dorrain spoke about the UDRP, ICANN's domain name arbitration process, largely developed by WIPO. She noted that the UDRP was not developed using a multi-stakeholder approach, but that it is used by not only most of the gTLDs but also by several ccTLDs, whereas others have similar dispute resolution systems. The most common change made by other countries to the UDRP is the requirements of evidence of use in bad faith. Her research is as to why developed and developing countries choose, or do not choose, to adopt the UDRP and what changes they make or believe should be made. She also noted that the UDRP has not been amended since 1999 and that it may be time for its review.

The next speaker was Fred Tipson from Microsoft. He said that nation states are still the main locus of official decision making, but that the modern world will not function as it needs to without bringing the other domains into the governance system. The value of the IGF as he sees it is not to drive towards decisions or consensus within the forum, but it is over the long term to generate consensus at each of the distinct governance levels.

The workshop's three case studies were then presented by Veni Markovski from the Internet Society of Bulgaria regarding its relationship with the country's government, Fernando Claudio from PANOS on the shrinking digital divide and the growing but largely ignored "content gap", and Dr Peng Hwa Ang from Singapore on that country's government-centric rather than free market approach to IT policy planning.

Pierre Dandjinou from the UNDP next spoke on how the international public sector could better manage the dialogue of developing international law. There is a lack of informed participation in and understanding of Internet governance institutions such as the ITU, ICANN, WTO, WIPO, CERT, COE and the W3C. He said a one stop shop is needed for accessing international law (I think he means also transnational private law) as related to the Internet.

The final speaker from the Diplo Foundation began by noting that the law necessarily lags behind technological development and hence Internet governance structures are still under development by a number of different architects. He then spoke specifically on capacity building, stating that this includes training as well as infrastructure. Different levels of training that can be provided could be described as awareness, understanding and knowledge. Multistakeholder capacity building is about the development of understanding between the legal and technical professions.