On 13 October 2025, KU Leuven hosted in Brussels REMIT’s fourth Scenario Testing Workshop (STW). This iteration focused on Internet governance and brought together experts and policymakers, including from the European Commission and EU national governments, to explore the possible effects of emerging technologies in the field.
Applying the Joint Research Centre’s Scenario Exploration System (SES) methodology, participants took on the roles of key actors in the Internet governance ecosystem. Namely, the EU, China, the private sector, a Global South coalition, and the technical/civil society community. The workshop revolved around two contrasting scenarios across two rounds, set for 2030 and 2035.
The first scenario, called “a Sovereign Fragmented Internet”, took a closer look at a world where the Internet becomes increasingly fragmented due to increased geopolitical rivalries around the globe and a focus on national security interests. The second scenario, “Multistakeholder Common Good”, envisioned a future with strengthened support for the multistakeholder model and common global interests, while states agree to refrain from politicising the backbone of the Internet.
Throughout the session, participants aimed to achieve their goals while considering emerging technologies such as AI-driven Domain Name System (DNS) abuse, blockchain-based naming systems, and quantum computing-based decryption.
To illustrate the timeliness of our REMIT EU project: precisely one week after our scenario workshop, the Amazon Web Services outage happened, the cause of which appears to be a DNS disruption in Amazon’s DomainDB DNS resolver. Precisely such as massive DNS disruption was foreseen as a real-life event in our scenario exercise! De facto centralisation of the Domain Name System can open the door to abuse or error leading to major outages, which, ironically, the Internet was specifically designed to prevent. This illustrates the importance for policymakers to proactively engage with the future of Internet governance.
REMIT’s scenario exercise on Internet Governance was also mentioned in relation to digital diplomacy at the EU CyberDirect Cyber Agora on 22 October in Brussels, by Paul Timmers as panellist and James Shires as participant.
