For average users, the content layer is their only experience of the Internet. This is where the programs and services and applications they access on an everyday basis exist. This does not mean that governance on the content layer is the only area relevant to average users. As should be clear by now, the three layers are inter-dependent, and what happens at the content layer is very much contingent on what happens at the other layers. For example, without an effective mechanism for ensuring interconnection, it would be impossible - or at any rate fruitless - to use a web-browser at the content level. Nonetheless, governance at this layer is a matter of critical (if not singular) importance for users.

Sub-areas: Content, Privacy and Data Protection
Information privacy, or data privacy is the relationship between collection and dissemination of data, technology, the public expectation of privacy, and the legal and political issues surrounding them.

Privacy concerns exist wherever personally identifiable information is collected and stored - in digital form or otherwise. Improper or non-existent disclosure control can be the root cause for privacy issues. Data privacy issues can arise in response to information from a wide range of sources, such as:

• Healthcare records
• Criminal justice investigations and proceedings
• Financial institutions and transactions
• Biological traits, such as genetic material
• Residence and geographic records
• Ethnicity
• Privacy Breach

The challenge in data privacy is to share data while protecting personally identifiable information. The fields of data security and information security design and utilize software, hardware and human resources to address this issue.

Sub-areas: Digital Divide
The Digital Divide refers to inequalities between individuals, households, business, and geographic areas at different socioeconomic levels in access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) and Internet connectivity and in the knowledge and skills needed to effectively use the information gained. The digital divide in the United States should not be confused with the Global digital divide which also refers to inequalities in access, knowledge, and skills, but designates countries as the units of analysis and examines the divide between developing and developed countries on an international scale.

Conceptualization of the digital divide is often as follows:

1. Theoretical explanations for the digital divide, or who connects with which attributes: demographic characteristics of connected individuals and their cohorts.
2. Means of connectivity, or how individuals and their cohorts are connecting and to what: infrastructure, location, and network availability.
3. Purpose of connectivity, or why individuals and their cohorts are connecting: reasons individuals are online and uses of the Internet and ICTs.
4. Lack of connectivity, or why individuals and their cohorts are not connecting.