Internet organization and governance

The Internet is remarkable as a modern institution in that, while the technology was developed with considerable gov-ernment funding, the Net as we know it today is remarkably free of externally imposed authority or regulation. This is in sharp contrast with earlier communications technologies such as the telegraph and telephone, which were generally tightly regulated or even run by a government department such as the Post Office. In part this was due to the complex-ity of the technology and the fact that many political leaders had little familiarity with it and its implications. (Also, the speed of growth has been overwhelming in recent years, considering that the World Wide Web in its modern form was scarcely a decade and a half old as of 2008.)

Institutions of Self-Governance

While the Internet is not rigidly controlled, the need for interoperability and orderly advances in technology has led to the emergence of several organizations that provide censorship and the standards and guidance. The most important of these is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Other technical organizations include the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the latter of which administers the domain system (seen domain name system). The domain registries in turn are run by many different institutions and agencies.

Growing Role of Governments?

Many of the key innovators of the Internet have loosely shared a somewhat anarchic or libertarian viewpoint, and reinforced it with the claim that the decentralized archi-tecture of the Internet itself resists imposition of rules from outside. (Thus the saying, “the Internet sees censorship as a failure and routes around it.”)

However, recently some writers such as Lawrence Les-sig of Stanford Law School have called for a reappraisal. Lessig argues that the Internet is far from ungovernable and that indeed such an important institution must be regu-lated. The question is how to regulate it wisely, shaping its architecture to support freedom, democracy, and other desirable values.

In 2003 and 2005, the United Nations brought together many government representatives who raised many issues about what they saw as inadequacies of the privately run Internet (for example, in the assigning of domain names) and a perceived bias toward American interests. The United Nations has established an Information and Com-munication Technologies (ICT) Task Force to carry on these meetings, which will be called the Internet Gover-nance Forum (IGF). Other international institutions such as the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) have sometimes come into conflict with the Internet’s self-governing bodies.

Within the United States there continues to be strong resistance to imposing new regulations on the Internet, in part because of fear of constricting one of the most impor-tant and fastest growing sectors of the economy. The conflict between the Internet’s self-governing culture and the needs and desires of political institu-tions will no doubt continue. Sometimes the conflict can be very sharp, as with China’s blocking of Internet content that it finds objectionable (see Internet). Other issues are perhaps deeper, such as the question of how to enforce criminal laws or economic regulations that were designed for a world made of brick and steel.