A Political History of the Internet

In the summer of 2013—the summer of the Edward Snowden revelations—I was an intern at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency within the Commerce Department tasked with developing policies to promote and govern communications technologies. It was a heady time for internet policy, and one of the highlights of that summer was sitting in on a meeting with Fiona Alexander, then associate administrator of NTIA’s Office of International Affairs, as the administration responded to some of the debates that followed in the wake of Snowden’s disclosures.

More than a dozen years later, I am now an internet law professor, and fewer and fewer students understand the events of that summer. The Snowden policy debates have receded into history. We need to teach internet history to inform future internet governance efforts and efforts to govern whatever technical systems come next. To do so well, we need internet histories, including accounts by veterans of those debates.

With “Geopolitics at the Internet’s Core,” Alexander and her co-authors—Laura De Nardis, Nanette S. Levinson, and Francesca Musiani—have contributed to filling that need. The book focuses exclusively on issues relating to the internet protocol. The internet protocol is the set of rules that makes the internet possible. These rules determine how data is formatted, addressed, and routed from one point in the internet’s vast network of networks to another. By allowing communications or other data to be broken up into packets and reassembled at the specified destination, the internet protocol facilitates efficient movement of data across many machines connected in complex ways and often separated by vast distances. At first glance, the internet protocol may thus seem like nothing more than a set of technical rules. But Alexander and her co-authors persuasively make the case that the internet protocol “is and will continue to be a space of control and power.”

The book’s two halves approach the inherently political nature of this crucial but seemingly merely technical system from different perspectives. In the first half, the authors describe how countries jockeyed to control the development of the internet protocol. They demonstrate how politics infiltrates processes through which technical standards are set, adjusted, and governed.  The second half of the book takes a broader view, recounting instances in which governments have used the internet protocol as a vector for achieving geopolitical aims other than control over the network itself—for instance, leveraging this essential element of the internet’s architecture to censor or to advance protectionist goals.

The book is strongest as a record of the geopolitical decisions that states have made about the internet protocol and its associated functions. The book clearly and concisely explains the dynamics of the debate over which fundamental protocol would structure internet communications, the American-born TCP/IP or the European-born OSI, and this portion of the book would be useful for a classroom assignment. The book’s histories of the internet governance institutions that emerged, from the World Summit on the Information Society in 2003 to the Domain Name System (DNS) tensions generated by the Ukraine-Russia conflict in 2022, is impeccable. It will enrich the understanding even of those with considerable prior expertise. 

The book’s crown jewel is Chapter 5, which presents a beat-by-beat account of the transition from U.S.-anchored governance of key internet protocol matters to global governance through the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 2016-2017. As the authors promise, this chapter delivers a “first-hand, direct policymaking” perspective on this transition. This is exactly the kind of precise, insider source material that will be critical to passing on the lessons of the internet governance debates to the next generation. 

Where the book falls short is in its theoretical and explanatory promise. The authors promise “[an] analytical frame that can methodologically be applied to other complex infrastructure controversies.” Instead, the book better functions as a “longitudinal case study,” as it elsewhere describes itself. In part, this outcome results from the authors’ choice to leave their most helpful analytical framings to the end of the book, rather than developing them in concert with their case studies.

For instance, the book’s closing offers a helpful list of eight points of leverage over the internet protocol. Among these: control over the allocation of internet protocol addresses themselves (distributional forces, as the authors term it) and the co-opting of internet protocol infrastructure for the kinds of political aims mentioned above (intermediation). This kind of framing would have provided a helpful guide to readers as they made their way through the details of the book’s case studies.

Working these framing contributions into the case studies could help bolster some of the interesting claims that, at present, are presented so subtly that a next-generation reader might miss their significance. For example, the authors contend that the U.S. government’s decision to transition allocation of internet protocol addresses to a global institution was deeply self-interested. They suggest that the U.S. government made a calculated call that global multistakeholder governance would serve the long-term interests of the U.S. better than holding on to the reins of that governance. The thinking was that controlling the transition to global governance would preserve multistakeholder governance. Multistakeholder governance refers to a process not strictly limited to state actors. The U.S. views multistakeholder governance as beneficial for multiple reasons, including that this form of governance allows the extensive U.S. tech industry a seat at the table. In contrast, keeping the functions under U.S. government control could fuel critiques of multistakeholder governance and embolden supporters of alternatives, such as a state-centric, multilateral framework. This is a striking claim; I wanted more integration of this decision into the broader frameworks suggested by the book and analysis of this decision’s geopolitical ripples a decade on.

The book’s focus on the internet protocol provides a helpful limiting strategy in approaching the breadth of internet policy debates, but the narrowness of that focus also obscures some of the important ways that the geopolitics of the internet protocol intersects with political struggles over the internet’s physical layer. For instance, less powerful countries, shut out of control of physical systems, may seek greater leverage at the standards-setting stage or by advancing alternate legal regimes governing aspects of the internet. Examining bridges between governance of the physical and protocol layers could provide even greater insights into the geopolitics of the internet.

“Geopolitics at the Internet’s Core” opens and closes with the concept of punctuated equilibrium, developed by evolutionary biologists to describe the path of evolutionary change, which combines long periods of stability and periodic sharp shifts. The authors suggest the internet’s history displays a similarly discontinuous pattern. They offer readers an excellent record of some of the most significant rapid jumps in the internet’s history so far. On occasion, their book would have benefited from stepping outside the confines of the internet protocol itself and into broader contests over internet infrastructure. But this book is one I’m glad to have both on my shelf and in my syllabi.