Internet Governance can be understood as a search process, the aim of which is to establish legitimate and stable ways of filling a regulatory void. This void is due to the fact that the principle of sovereignty which governs the international telecommunications regime has not been applied to the Internet. To date, it has been impossible to develop stable governance arrangements for the Internet. However, there have been three less dynamic periods during the last 15 years when the speed of change slowed down for a time. The first period, which lasted approximately until the mid 1990s, could be called the technical regime. The central forum at that time was the Internet's first standard setting organization, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Until the mid 1990s, Internet Governance more or less amounted to developing technical standards and administrating technical identifiers. The second period of Internet Governance emerged as a result of the privatization of the Net's infrastructure. It was marked by efforts to establish a self-governance regime independent of government authority, associated with open, inclusive, bottom-up, and consensus-based decision-making. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit company founded in 1998 and based in California, was initiated by the US Government to institutionalize Internet self-governance. However, ICANN proved unable to meet the high expectations within the framework of private sector management of the Internet's infrastructure. The relevant stakeholders couldn't agree on policy decisions, and many of them were unwilling to delegate authority to ICANN. A third period of Internet Governance has been evolving in the context of the UN World Summit on Information Society (WSIS). This summit has caused a "forum shift" away from ICANN towards intergovernmental territory. It has enabled new actors to participate in the discussion of Internet Governance, among them governments from developing countries but also international NGOs, which are pushing a broader agenda including issues such as human rights, digital divides, and cultural diversity. While a stable regime for the Internet still seems a long way off, WSIS may very well have influenced the direction of the search process. State intervention has lost its negative connotations. Instead, there is growing interest in what is now called a "multi-stakeholder approach" to Internet Governance, which would include governments, industry, and civil society.