Governing Global Electronic Networks: International Perspectives on Policy and Power

Citation

Marsden, C. (2010), "Governing Global Electronic Networks: International Perspectives on Policy and Power", info, Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 90-91. https://doi.org/10.1108/14636691011040503

Everything about this book is authoritative – from its contributor list, which is a virtual Who's Who of international communications policy, to its magisterial opening chapter of 80 pages, in which the first co‐editor sets the scene, to the range and scope of the contributions themselves in over 600 pages, but it is its ambitious statement of aims that most claims that authority. Whether it succeeds is for posterity rather than a single reviewer to decide, but such an aim in itself makes this book worthy of your full attention. Think of this as a handbook more than a usual edited volume and you begin to appreciate the scale of the ambition and the editorial task. It is evident that this book was a long time in germinating from a 2002 OSI conference, but the gestation appears well worth the task, and the chapters were updated in 2006‐2007 in the wake of the Working Group on Internet Governance, two World Summits on the Information Society, and the creation of the Internet Governance Forum.

Drake and Wilson first identify the aim of the book: to reconsider our past paradigms of international communications policy “to offer the reader nontraditional perspectives on the global governance of global information and communication networks”. That is, the view is not drawn from the “Washington consensus” of liberalising globalisers, but “views the global governance of networks more from the bottom up, and the outside in”.

To provide a framework for this, he identifies three stages of global communications governance (or the nicely punned “NetWorld Orders”): roughly, pre‐1980 statist ITU‐dominated, 1980‐1994 liberalisation and privatisation, and the period since then when the global internet took off and the governance architecture became more complex and differentiated. He tries to isolate what “governance” actually is. Over the past 15 years, it has become such a “weasel word”, in the description by one of its foremost proponents R.A.W. Rhodes, that Drake's decision to isolate a definition is essential to cynics, and most welcome to sympathisers. He examines no less than 18 points, different attempts to define by other academic authors, before settling on his own version: “global governance is the development and application of shared principles, norms, rules, decision‐making procedures, and programs intended to shape actors' expectations and practices and to enhance their collective management capacities in world affairs” (pp. 8‐9). He explains that programs is an important addition to the toolset, and that unilateral actors can have global governance impacts, whereas by contrast global chatter is not the same as governance.

Part I deals with global governance of infrastructure broadly drawn; Part II of the book deals with global governance of “content” (information, communication including mass media, e‐commerce); Part III deals specifically with nondominant actors's problems in trying to participate in ICT global governance processes. Even in such a comprehensive institutional and empirical set of case studies, there are gaps, and the editors draw attention to the need to examine the role of multinational corporate actors in the processes (where research in political economy tends to be either dry technical process descriptions or an economists' series of dominant actor war stories over for instance 3G telephony or WiFi standards)[1].

The problems of liberalisation grappled with by the authors are knotty, particularly where the latest stage of competitive liberalisation has tended to tipping the fruits of the ICT revolution in favour of a few large trans‐national corporations, mostly American, though with a sprinkling of mobile billionaires from developing countries, and denude the coffers of state‐run fixed telecoms companies. Liberalisation has proved to be very much a two‐edged sword, with the enormous growth of mobile arresting or reversing already glacial fixed‐line development in many countries, notably India. In the same way, the American challenge in intellectual property, audiovisual products, commercialisation of formerly personal information, and other areas has been to erode national sovereignty without a concommitant growth in indigenous capacity, as noted by the Part II authors, notably May, Hamelink and Farrell. Part II authors Souter, Mueller and Kleinwachter illustrate the tendency towards a private sector takeover of the levers of ICT power following the American model, and examine the extent to which “multistakeholderism” via civil society can challenge, divert or at least shape this snowballing trend. There is room for optimism when one looks to the better examples such as the Internet Governance Forum, mixed views on fast‐reforming and deeply political ICANN but scepticism when looking at the core standard setting organisations for ICTs, where self‐professed individualism masks a retrenchment of transnational power in what is the core technical arena for governance decisions. Often leaden‐footed Chinese‐inspired protests against US leadership are not the same as a determined and organised resistance to the hegemon, as often gleefully celebrated by “techno‐diplomats” such as David Gross.

In the concluding chapter, Wilson asks us to recognise that civil society is transforming the debates and pushing a multistakeholder agenda, but however willing one is to embrace that possibility at the margins, it is difficult based on the previous contributions not to express a deep pessimism that this reformist agenda will become ingrained in the key corridors of power in ICT governance. Nevertheless, I particularly note that the policy importance of this volume is enhanced by the decision to select case studies “because they are practically important rather than in accordance with a particular scholarly methodology” (p. 3) which demonstrates the project's key concern with analysing power relations in global ICT governance, and the use of recommendations for action to end chapters, rather than the traditionally limp academic summary of findings. The state of the art is excellently portrayed in this book, which I can recommend as essential reading for all those interested in the future of ICT governance, policymakers and academics alike.

Notes

Note that two of the Part I authors have extended arguments in later books of their own, Cowhey and Aronson (2009) in Transforming Global Information and Communication Markets: The Political Economy of Innovation in the MIT series in which this appears (and of which Drake and Wilson are also editors), and Frieden (2010) in Winning the Silicon Sweepstakes: Can the US Compete in Global Telecommunications? (Yale University Press).