When people in Pakistan hear “internet governance,” they usually think of one thing: the government blocking a website, passing a law like PECA, or regulating what can be posted on social media. That’s a real part of it, but it’s a narrow slice of a much bigger picture, and the bigger picture is one Pakistan participates in far less than it could.
What internet governance actually means
Internet governance is the set of rules, norms, and institutions that decide how the internet works globally: who gets a domain name, how data crosses borders, how new technical standards are adopted, and increasingly, how AI systems built on top of the internet get governed. Unlike a single country’s cybercrime law, most of this happens through a multistakeholder model: governments, the private sector, civil society, the technical community, and academia sit at the same table, on equal footing, rather than governments simply deciding alone.
The main global venue for this is the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), established by the United Nations following the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society. The IGF doesn’t pass binding laws. What it does is shape the norms and shared understanding that later show up in national policy, including the kind Pakistan writes. IGF 2025 was held in Lillestrøm, Norway in June 2025; IGF 2026 is scheduled for December 14 to 18 in Nairobi, Kenya, with the theme “Governing the Internet in the Age of Intelligence: Our Shared Responsibility,” reflecting how central AI governance has become to this space.
A separate but related layer is technical governance: bodies like ICANN oversee the domain name system that makes the internet actually work. This isn’t abstract for Pakistan. The .pk domain has existed since 1992, delegated by IANA and managed locally by PKNIC, a Lahore-based, non-profit registry. In 2017, a separate Urdu-script domain, .پاکستان, was delegated as well, managed by the National Telecommunication Corporation. Pakistan is already a participant in global internet governance at this technical level, whether or not that fact is widely known.
Pakistan’s uneven track record
Where Pakistan has participated less consistently is the policy layer, the actual multistakeholder conversations where global norms get debated. According to a country report published by the Global Information Society Watch, Pakistani digital rights activists first attempted to organize a national IGF in 2015. That effort didn’t materialize, in part because it coincided with the government pushing through the 2016 cybercrime law over the same activists’ objections, deepening rather than bridging the gap between government and civil society on these issues. A national IGF for Pakistan was later formally established and recognized in 2017, but that same report describes government participation in regional and global IGF sessions as thin: a handful of activists and rarely more than one or two government officials, with sessions led by Pakistani participants seeing little to no state presence.
There are more recent, genuinely encouraging signs. The Pakistan Youth IGF was established in 2025 to give young people a dedicated forum on digital governance issues. The same year, the Asia Pacific Youth IGF ran one of its two physical hubs in Islamabad alongside Manila, concluding in October 2025 with a Declaration on Meaningful Youth Participation calling for young people to be treated as equal partners in digital governance, not an afterthought. This is real momentum, but it’s youth- and civil-society-driven. It hasn’t yet been matched by a comparable, sustained government presence at the tables where global rules actually get shaped.
Why this matters right now
2026 is a consequential year for this space. The IGF’s mandate and the broader direction of global digital cooperation are under review as part of the WSIS+20 process, and AI governance is now central to that conversation. These discussions will produce norms and frameworks that eventually influence how Pakistan regulates AI, data, and platforms, whether or not Pakistani stakeholders are in the room when they’re written. A seat at the table isn’t symbolic. It’s the difference between having input into rules before they’re set, versus reacting to them after the fact, which is largely the pattern with PECA and similar laws so far.
What “a seat at the table” actually requires
It’s not just about sending one more government delegate to Geneva or Nairobi. Meaningful participation needs a broader base: journalists who can report on these processes accurately, technologists who understand the infrastructure layer, civil society groups tracking rights implications, academics contributing research, and everyday citizens who understand enough to hold all of the above accountable. That base doesn’t exist yet in Pakistan at the scale this moment calls for.
That’s part of why CyberWalk is expanding into internet governance coverage. We’ll be tracking not just Pakistan’s cyber laws, but the country’s actual participation, or non-participation, in the global processes that increasingly shape what those laws end up looking like.
Full source list:
- Internet Governance Forum, official site
- IGF 2025, Lillestrøm, Norway
- IGF 2026, Nairobi, Kenya
- Pakistan IGF, official IGF listing
- Pakistan Youth IGF, official IGF listing
- Global Information Society Watch, Pakistan country report
- Asia Pacific Youth IGF (yigf.asia)
- PKNIC / .pk registry history, ICANNWiki
- .pk ccTLD, Wikipedia