Pascal Griset

Hosting the World Wide Web Consortium for Europe: from CERN to INRIA

This paper studies the role that Europeans have taken in the governance of the Web and the factors influencing the emergence of a new governing body within Europe by means of an analysis of the transfer of the European branch of the new World Wide Web Consortium from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) during the 1990s. In order to understand how INRIA came to hold this responsibility, it is necessary to consider the issue on many levels, examining national, European, and transnational ambitions with regard to Internet governance. The historical view taken in this article demonstrates the crucial importance of the initiatives undertaken by individual players, in addition to the technical and political issues. These issues are particularly critical at a time when Internet governance is more often the focus of researchers involved in defining it than of the institutions to which they belong.