Böcker av Milton L. Mueller

How and why the US government gave up its control of ICANN, the global coordinator of internet names, numbers, and protocols—and what the geopolitical consequences were.In 1997 the U.S. decided that the Internet should be governed not by governments, but by something called the “global Internet community.” In Declaring Independence in Cyberspace,Milton Mueller tells the story of why it took 20 years of organizational and geopolitical stuggle to make that happen.ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), created in 1998, was the US government’s answer to the question of who would control the Internet registries—a key part of the Internet infrastructure supporting domain names, network numbers, IP addresses, and other protocol parameters. Originally, ICANN was a bold institutional innovation based on a vision of Internet governance that was thoroughly globalized and independent of nation-states. Declaring Independence in Cyberspace explains where this vision came from, the problems posed by its implementation, and the organization’s near-self destruction in its first five years. The U.S. government refused to let go of ICANN for 15 years, triggering geopolitical conflicts over sovereignty and U.S. power. Mueller details why, what prompted its change of heart, and how the problem of making ICANN accountable to its community in the absence of U.S. government control sparked a political battle in Washington. His account gets to the very heart of a pressing question with profound global implications: Is state sovereignty the immutable foundation of global governance, or do new technological capabilities change the model?

How institutions for Internet governance are emerging from the tension between the territorially bound nation-state and a transnational network society.When the prevailing system of governing divides the planet into mutually exclusive territorial monopolies of force, what institutions can govern the Internet, with its transnational scope, boundless scale, and distributed control? Given filtering/censorship by states and concerns over national cybersecurity, it is often assumed that the Internet will inevitably be subordinated to the traditional system of nation-states. In Networks and States, Milton Mueller counters this, showing how Internet governance poses novel and fascinating governance issues that give rise to a global politics and new transnational institutions. Drawing on theories of networked governance, Mueller provides a broad overview of Internet governance from the formation of ICANN to the clash at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the formation of the Internet Governance Forum, the global assault on peer-to-peer file sharing, and the rise of national-level Internet control and security concerns. Internet governance has become a source of conflict in international relations. Networks and States explores the important role that emerging transnational institutions could play in fostering global governance of communication-information policy.