113 research outputs found

    ICANN, Inc.: Accountability and participation in the governance of critical Internet resources

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    This paper assesses the relationship between public participation and accountability in ICANN. It explains how ICANN has responded to accountability concerns by creating new opportunities for public comment, review, and participation. Is public participation an adequate means of making this global Internet governance organization accountable to the public? ICANN is fundamentally a private corporation. Private corporations are held accountable in three ways: 1) directly through their membership or shareholders, 2) through competition, which gives the public the opportunity to avoid their products or services, and 3) through external regulation or supervision by judicial or public authorities. None of these forms of accountability apply to ICANN. Instead, the public is given a wide range of opportunities to participate in ICANN's processes and to voice their opinions. This paper questions whether participation is an adequate substitute for accountability. It analyzes three distinct reforms in ICANN's history to show how participation can displace accountability rather than improve it

    Origins of the Domain Name System

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    Shaping the global communications milieu : the EU's influence on internet and telecommunications governance

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    This article evaluates the European Union's (EU) influence in shaping the global governance for telecommunications and the Internet. Through analysing EU behaviour within an actorness framework, we demonstrate how the external opportunity structure and the EU's internal environment has impacted on its ability to exert and maximize its presence in order to meet its goals and aims in these two very different sub-sectors of global communications in terms of evolution and development. Such a comparison of EU actorness, we argue, is revealing in terms of uncovering the underlying factors and conditions that allow the EU to influence two important and dynamic communications sub-sectors

    Constitutional Analogies in the International Legal System

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    This Article explores issues at the frontier of international law and constitutional law. It considers five key structural and systemic challenges that the international legal system now faces: (1) decentralization and disaggregation; (2) normative and institutional hierarchies; (3) compliance and enforcement; (4) exit and escape; and (5) democracy and legitimacy. Each of these issues raises questions of governance, institutional design, and allocation of authority paralleling the questions that domestic legal systems have answered in constitutional terms. For each of these issues, I survey the international legal landscape and consider the salience of potential analogies to domestic constitutions, drawing upon and extending the writings of international legal scholars and international relations theorists. I also offer some preliminary thoughts about why some treaties and institutions, but not others, more readily lend themselves to analysis in constitutional terms. And I distinguish those legal and political issues that may generate useful insights for scholars studying the growing intersections of international and constitutional law from other areas that may be more resistant to constitutional analogies

    Updating democracy studies: outline of a research program

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    Technologies carry politics since they embed values. It is therefore surprising that mainstream political and legal theory have taken the issue so lightly. Compared to what has been going on over the past few decades in the other branches of practical thought, namely ethics, economics and the law, political theory lags behind. Yet the current emphasis on Internet politics that polarizes the apologists holding the web to overcome the one-to-many architecture of opinion-building in traditional representative democracy, and the critics that warn cyber-optimism entails authoritarian technocracy has acted as a wake up call. This paper sets the problem – “What is it about ICTs, as opposed to previous technical devices, that impact on politics and determine uncertainty about democratic matters?” – into the broad context of practical philosophy, by offering a conceptual map of clusters of micro-problems and concrete examples relating to “e-democracy”. The point is to highlight when and why the hyphen of e-democracy has a conjunctive or a disjunctive function, in respect to stocktaking from past experiences and settled democratic theories. My claim is that there is considerable scope to analyse how and why online politics fails or succeeds. The field needs both further empirical and theoretical work

    No Synonyms: Global Governance and the Transnational Public

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    Building on the classical literature of the public, the article critically analyses the current literature on global governance. After briefly presenting the classical understanding of the public the author goes on to argue that in global governance the effectiveness of collective problem-solving is seen as a compensation for its lack of inclusiveness which in turn makes it impossible to equate global governance with (transnational) public. The author criticizes the substitution of the term “the public” by “stakeholders” since the notion of stakeholders allows for economically powerful voices to intervene in public decision-making processes. The article furthermore criticizes ideas on global governance as “strong publics” on the basis that even if the decision-making seen in global governance was to follow the ideal of rational deliberation, this would not make it equal to the transnational publics, since the deliberations of transnational “strong publics” are per definition exclusive in nature

    Beyond NETmundial: The Roadmap for Institutional Improvements to the Global Internet Governance Ecosystem

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    Beyond NETmundial: The Roadmap for Institutional Improvements to the Global Internet Governance Ecosystem explores options for the implementation of a key section of the “NETmundial Multistakeholder Statement” that was adopted at the Global Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance (NETmundial) held on April 23rd and 24th 2014 in São Paulo, Brazil. The Roadmap section of the statement concisely sets out a series of proposed enhancements to existing mechanisms for global internet governance, as well as suggestions of possible new initiatives that the global community may wish to consider. The sixteen chapters by leading practitioners and scholars are grouped into six sections: The NETmundial Meeting; Strengthening the Internet Governance Forum; Filling the Gaps; Improving ICANN; Broader Analytical Perspectives; and Moving Forward

    Negotiating Internet Governance

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    What is at stake for how the Internet continues to evolve is the preservation of its integrity as a single network. In practice, its governance is neither centralised nor unitary; it is piecemeal and fragmented, with authoritative decision-making coming from different sources simultaneously: governments, businesses, international organisations, technical and academic experts, and civil society. Historically, the conditions for their interaction were rarely defined beyond basic technical coordination, due at first to the academic freedom granted to the researchers developing the network and, later on, to the sheer impossibility of controlling mushrooming Internet initiatives. Today, the search for global norms and rules for the Internet continues, be it for cybersecurity or artificial intelligence, amid processes fostering the supremacy of national approaches or the vitality of a pluralist environment with various stakeholders represented. This book provides an incisive analysis of the emergence and evolution of global Internet governance, unpacking the complexity of more than 300 governance arrangements, influential debates and political negotiations over four decades. Highly accessible, this book breaks new ground through a wide empirical exploration and a new conceptual approach to governance enactment in global issue domains. A tripartite framework is employed for revealing power dynamics, relying on: a) an extensive database of mechanisms of governance for the Internet at the global and regional level; b) an in-depth analysis of the evolution of actors and priorities over time; and c) a key set of dominant practices observed in the Internet governance communities. It explains continuity and change in Internet-related negotiations, opening up new directions for thinking and acting in this field
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