Throughout the 1990s, the Internet was opened to commercial uses; by the end of the decade, a tech stock craze inflated and then burst the “dot com” bubble, making the Internet mainstream in the process. In the United States and Europe, regulators suddenly took notice; however, they chose a “laissez-faire” attitude and focused on protecting economic growth more than rights. Still, some technical resources required centralized, global governance; the primary example was the Domain Name System (DNS), the Internet’s “phonebook,” leading to the establishment of ICANN. After experiments with direct democracy, the technical governance of the Internet was designed around the multi-stakeholder principle. Alternative proposals to adopt the traditional multilateral model of United Nations agencies were soon defeated, even if the multi-stakeholder principle often failed to contain the power of stronger economic and geopolitical actors. Activists for digital freedoms pushed for more: the introduction of peer-to-peer architectures successfully eroded the dominant positions of entire industries. New political movements, like the Pirate Parties, formed around the idea of bottom-up electronic democracy. The Internet seemed to be an unstoppable force of freedom. However, at the end of the 2000s, things started to change.