The conclusion situates the book’s findings in academic debates on democracy and the Internet, global self-regulation, and civil society, and international decision-making processes in unstructured environments. It assesses whether current standards-developing organization (SDO) decision-making is able to bridge historical representation gaps and deficiencies. A nuanced pattern is emerging with increasing inclusion of a wider number of actors within SDO fora. The first part of the chapter returns to the Multiple Streams (MS) framework applied to the case studies on a comparative basis. It identifies key processes under which SDO rules of interaction are established at the international level and explains which interests have come to the fore within decision-making highlighting the occurrence of policy entrepreneurship, forum shopping, and coupling. The final part explores additional frameworks for SDO regulation where spaces for public interest consideration might occur in the future. These are opportunities for inserting public interest considerations into international and national Acts, certification programmes, and the move towards open source solutions for Internet management. The book concludes that, although the literature is expansive on the interaction of corporate sector actors within SDOs, the study of other actors, such as digital rights groups, civil society, academics, policy entrepreneurs and the technical community as a whole, has been underdressed in the literature on international self-regulatory fora to date. In this respect, the book raises important questions of representation of the public interest at the international level by having addressed the actions of actors within SDO fora who promote public interest goals.
Application of Environmental Conflict Resolution to Public Interest Issues in Water Disputes