The 2026 eCrime Measurement, Risk and Policy Roundtables will examine how Internet governance is evolving. Specifically, this year’s colloquium will consider how hyperscaled vertically integrated computational infrastructure providers and AI reasoning platforms have evolved into sovereignties in their own right. Within this dialog, delegates will examine how these new and still evolving Internet infrastructure titans are incrementally displacing contemporary Internet-governance frameworks as currently curated by groups like ICANN and ISOC and IGF/UN coordination.

Just a quarter century ago, the Internet's institutional architecture was programmatically distributed among constituencies representing different technical operations, technical standards, commercial interests and governance perspectives, embodied by organizations such as: ICANN; Registries and Registrars; IETF; RIRs; ISPs; and telcos. This multi-stakeholder model was itself, in part, a rejection of the national sovereignty/licensing model framed by the ITU and its suzerainty over telecommunications operating frameworks like SS7.

In 2026, today’s Internet governance model is being challenged by the operational
hegemony of integrated digital infrastructure platforms (e.g. AWS, Microsoft, Alphabet/Google, Oracle); Internet intermediation services providers (Cloudflare, Akamai); and AI reasoning platforms (e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) as these hyperscaled Internet infrastructure powers exercise their own separate sovereignty over compute infrastructure, network mediation, AI reasoning, and enterprise operations, becoming constitutional actors in their own right.