Polycentric or just eccentric?

I have described in this book an increasingly polycentric regulatory environment, in which networked government agencies interact with networked private sector actors, with networked NGOs and other civil society actors actively intervening in processes, negotiations and ultimately regulatory activities. It is because online activity offers so much freedom and risk to individual users that it is a paradigm of polycentric regulation, as Black terms it. The Internet has always been regulated in this manner, with increasingly comfortable accommodation between the needs of these various actors, adding venture capital to the mix as start-up companies and financiers have been vitally important to Internet entrepreneurship. The route to this intermingled co-regulatory environment has also been somewhat novel in that it owes as much to bottom-up as top-down co-regulation. Bottom-up can be seen in many standards organizations, content (especially print journalism) and technical regulatory bodies, and top-down in other more traditional standards bodies, and regulatory arrangements inherited from telecoms and broadcasting inheritances. The direction of travel is in almost all cases towards co-regulation, no matter what the basis from which each arrangement starts. I use the term ‘arrangement’ carefully, as in several environments there is no agency or SRO that one can identify, and regulatory activities rely on a mix of user-generated self-regulation (which genuinely exists in many places), self-organization and contractual rules imposed by the dominant service provider on its customers, and technical architectures which determine the enclosed space within which regulatory actors must operate (noting that those architectures may be changed by regulation as well as vice versa).