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Improving the governance of information technology: Insights from the history of Internet governance
journal contribution
posted on 2022-08-26, 12:28 authored by Neena Pandey, Rahul De, M.N. RavishankarGovernance of the Internet is a matter of global importance and concern. The multistakeholder (MS) and multilateral (ML) forms have been presented as two competing and
plausible models of Internet governance. Drawing on Actor Network Theory (ANT) and
building on an interpretive case study of rich archival data, this paper examines how the focal
actor’s (i.e., the U.S. government’s) beliefs influence the choice of Internet governance form.
It further explores the strategies of the focal actor to translate the interests of the ML
network’s supporters, with a view to enrolling them in the MS governance network. The
analysis shows how the focal actor has established the MS governance form through the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as an Obligatory Passage
Point to keep the Internet successfully operational. The analysis also illuminates the
combination of structural and collaborative strategies employed to allay the growing
dissatisfaction with the MS governance form. The paper suggests that whilst the protocols
and technical standards of the Internet are increasingly relegated to the background, the social
and political network that Internet artefacts draw together in a meta-form has grown in
prominence. It also argues that there may be a hierarchy of beliefs, which influence how
actors enact their translation strategies. Finally, the paper discusses parallels between the
MS/ML forms of Internet governance and IT governance in organizational contexts.
History
School
- Business and Economics
Department
- Business
Published in
Journal of Information TechnologyVolume
37Issue
3Pages
266-287Publisher
SAGE PublicationsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© Association for Information Technology TrustPublisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by SAGE Publications under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Acceptance date
2021-10-02Publication date
2022-02-01Copyright date
2022ISSN
0268-3962eISSN
1466-4437Publisher version
Language
- en