ICANN and the Global Dialogue on US Dominance of Internet Governance.

The creation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) could be seen as an assertion and reinforcement of the hegemony of the United States over the Internet. By United States I mean not just the US Government, but also its industry, its technology and in many respects the values associated with a liberal democratic order in communications. The paper will describe and investigate the nature of his hegemonic system, making it clear that simplistic notions of US dominance imposed on an unwilling world don’t get one very far. What we see instead are several self-reinforcing cycles of the sort that made Silicon Valley the world capital of IT innovation and Hollywood the world capital for filmmaking: network effects and agglomeration economies and first-mover advantages. The hegemonic system did not follow traditional national lines. The Internet protocols were victorious in a standards war that pitted TCP/IP against protocols (OSI) that were backed not only by European governments and European telecommunications operators, but also by the US Department of Commerce and many US telephone companies. The early Internet community was international in scope; although it was centered in and mostly populated by US computer scientists, it embraced several European and Asian institutes. These non-US technologists were outside the mainstream in their own countries and both the US and the non-US technologists often showed more allegiance to their own epistemic community than to their governments. Nevertheless, when it came time to privatize and commercialize the Internet the US government did retain the ability to control the terms of the governance transition because US military and civilian contractors were operating the centralized naming and numbering spaces. More significantly, despite its initial promise that it would fully privatize ICANN, the US reneged and retained indefinitely an unusual form of unilateral contractual control over what is ostensibly an international organization. Not much later, concerns about security and terrorism post 9-11 reinforced the decision to keep a US grip on the root of the Internet, making the relationship between ICANN and the USG a delicate matter. In addition to clarifying the historical emergence of US dominance of the Internet this paper will have three parts: * First, by way of factual background, it will analyze the institutional relationships between ICANN and the US government. * Second, it will explore and describe the ways in which assertions of the identity of a distinct Internet community interact with regional/cultural and national identities in the politics of ICANN. In developing this analysis, a critique of academically romantic notions of diversity and difference will emerge. * Third, it will explore the extent to which ICANN’s creation was a direct challenge to the hegemony of traditional intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), especially the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). It will pay particular attention to the efforts of the ITU to undermine ICANN’s legitimacy and assert a role for traditional IGOs in Internet governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]