Every device that connects to the internet – your phone, probably your car, maybe your utility meters, definitely the various computers you use and countless industrial devices which are vital to the running of modern society – each one needs a unique internet address to work. Those addresses are allocated and managed by five separate non-profit organisations covering different regions of the world. One of these organisations, Afrinic, has ceased functioning. Afrinic provides internet addresses to the entire African continent. 

Afrinic currently has no CEO and is unable to constitute a board. Its bank accounts are frozen, and its staff are currently being paid through an emergency fund set up by the other regional internet registries. 

It’s a bad situation made worse by the fact that the collapse is due almost entirely to a Hong Kong businessman who found and exploited weaknesses in the organisation and who, observers fear, has the support of the Chinese government. 

Earlier this year, the same man, Lu Heng, tried and narrowly failed to effect a coup against another one of the five global organisations: this time the one that covers Asia-Pacific, APNIC. 

Six of the 13 candidates for the APNIC Executive Council were supported by an umbrella group, NRS, that ran a sophisticated misinformation campaign and even won endorsement from the Pakistan government. APNIC noticed the effort and warned its voting members just in time. 

These events have serious consequences for the future functioning of the global internet and last week in Rotterdam, the European address organisation, RIPE NCC, facilitated crisis talks about what could be done to prevent takeovers or serious disruption.

Despite recognising the danger, these critically important organisations are only now beginning to see the uncomfortable reality in which they sit: that they are not equipped to deal with the challenges that will increasingly be thrown at them. 

Convinced that they just have to ensure that their piece of the internet’s technical jigsaw is properly managed, they have failed to pull together for protection, failed to update their governance structures, failed to engage the next generation of engineers and leaders, and failed to see that governments are no longer the enemy but vital partners in keeping the internet together. It may already be too late.

The structures we have for limiting harm online are wildly insufficient thanks to the trans-border nature of electronic communication. Even when lawmakers feel obliged to act, it is extremely hard to accommodate other countries’ legal systems – and nothing in the digital age lives solely within one set of national borders.

Europe’s response to personal data being sold by US social media giants – GDPR – created problems for companies in every other part of the world because any data stemming from Europe is covered by the law. Many US businesses simply block their websites from being accessed from Europe. 

There are a huge range of efforts to deal with misinformation or damaging content but it’s proving impossible to reach agreement: the UK’s Online Safety Bill is still making its way through Parliament after more than five years. The mere sharing of data across the Atlantic has been subject to three different regimes in three years as each has fallen foul of the law. 

When it comes to AI, there is an abundance of principles, frameworks, guidelines and draft legislation that has been produced by people across the globe; all of it aimed at providing clarity but with the net effect of doing the complete opposite.

Meanwhile, digital successes have one thing in common: people and organisations have learned to work transnationally. Police forces across the globe have found new ways of working together, often shepherding changes to the law to make that coordination possible. Recent raids have seen multiple jurisdictions work side-by-side so smugglers, drug dealers and violent criminals find it much harder to commit crimes in one country and then hide in another jurisdiction. 

When it comes to policing the parts of the internet that law-abiding citizens use, however, we are understandably wary of governments getting involved. The problem is that we may no longer have a choice. 

Afrinic is currently unable to function because it is a corporation based in Mauritius. When it demanded that Lu Heng return millions of IP addresses that it said were being misused, he sued it and the CEO personally. And the Mauritian courts treated it just like any other corporation. 

APNIC, which has similarly clashed with Heng, maintains itself as a community-led autonomous organisation. Its members choose what to do and they vote for their leaders. Despite its vital importance to billions of people, however, APNIC has fewer than 10,000 members – and this small electorate is vulnerable to manipulation. 

So what is the answer to our growing internet woes? Fortunately, history has the answer. After the Second World War, the nations of the world saw the need to solve certain problems at a global scale. In response, we developed a number of global forums. 

The International Atomic Energy Authority was one such entity. It was set up in 1957, four years after President Eisenhower first argued for its creation. 

The IAEA is remarkable in that, logically, it shouldn’t work. Within the same organisation, two very different cultures co-exist. One is among the most secretive in the world, refusing to divulge findings of misuse of nuclear energy even to the most powerful governments in the world until its report is complete. And the other culture adopts the belief that open sharing of information on how to harness nuclear energy as a power source is critical to everyone’s safety. 

The two parts share the same corridors, the same meeting rooms and cross-fertilise their knowledge, providing an authority that is rarely questioned and which works in the global interests of all.

You can’t have a literal IAEA for the internet, of course – the model is too old, its reach too limited and its work patterns ill-suited to the digital world. But its existence does prove that when the need and the political will are there it is possible to solve seemingly intractable technological issues within the right organisation. All it takes is vision, guts, diplomacy and the occasional brilliant insight.

I would suggest that Britain can lead the way here. The UK is now outside the European Union and free to manoeuvre independently and comparatively nimbly. We have a longstanding special relationship with the US, a proud diplomatic history that encouraged trade across half the globe, and until fairly recent times Britain was known for pragmatism and ability to get things done in at least some of our government departments. There is an opportunity in the world’s current digital problems for the UK to rebuild its global stature.

We need new global forums designed for the digital age that can drive new technology’s potential while ensuring its underlying structure is protected from efforts to game today’s largely unprotected systems. If Global Britain is to fulfil its potential, this is the sort of problem we should be seeking to solve.