What the History of Internet Governance Tells Us About the Future of Tech Policy

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

Today’s guest is Milton L. Mueller, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the School of Public Policy and the head of an advocacy policy analysis group called the Internet Governance Project.

Mueller has long walked the halls and sat in the rooms where internet governance is discussed and debated, and has played a role in shaping global Internet policies and institutions.

He’s the author of a new book called Declaring Independence in Cyberspace: Internet Self-Governance and the End of US Control of ICANN, which takes us into those rooms, telling the story of how and why the US government gave up its control of ICANN, a key internet governance institution responsible for internet names, numbers, and protocols.

That history tells us a lot about where we are today when it comes to the broader geopolitics and governance of technology, and it has implications for the governance fights ahead, including over artificial intelligence.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Justin Hendrix:

Good morning. I'm Justin Hendrix, Editor of Tech Policy Press, a non-profit media venture intended to provoke new ideas, debate and discussion at the intersection of technology and democracy. For the uninitiated, the world of internet governance can seem impenetrable. Some of it is understanding the technology, but like most things, a lot of it is just getting the hang of the vocabulary, the jargon, and the acronyms. If you look for it, you'll find a wiki that lists out close to 200 acronyms associated with key entities and documents and gatherings related to internet governance.

There are so many to keep track of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority or IANA, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the IETF, the Internet Governance Forum or IGF. Today's guest is one of the people who not only has that list memorized, but he's long walked the halls and sat in the rooms where those acronyms came to be, shaping global internet policies and institutions. He's the author of a new book that takes us into some of those rooms telling the story of how and why the US government gave up its control of ICANN, a key internet governance institution responsible for internet names, numbers, and protocols. That history tells us a lot about where we are today when it comes to the broader geopolitics and governance of technology and it's implications for the governance fights ahead, including over artificial intelligence.

Milton Mueller:

I'm Milton Mueller and I'm a Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the School of Public Policy, and I also run an advocacy policy analysis group called the Internet Governance Project. And we're just coming out with a book, the official release date is May 13th called Declaring Independence in Cyberspace, and it's the story of the IANA transition, the process by which the US government let go of its control of ICANN.

Justin Hendrix:

I wanted to start by just asking you to describe for the listener your area of research.

Milton Mueller:

Yeah, I would call it the research of the policy of the digital ecosystem. I started in what we used to call telecommunications policy and that sort of transmogrified into internet policy because the internet took over sort of the telecommunications infrastructure and internet really became the connection point for all kinds of digital applications and services and semiconductors and all of that became a big part of the story. So really I now just have to say I do digital governance or digital policy, and that includes everything from the sort of standard kinds of content moderation to digitization of money and cybersecurity. They all seem to be very closely related now, so it's hard to isolate it without becoming arbitrarily isolated in this particular policy domains.

Justin Hendrix:

You say in this book that you also regard yourself as sort of part of a community of people who had a certain set of ideas about the internet and what it could be, what it should be. Some of those ideas of course, have gone through various iterations over the last three or four decades, but how would you characterize how you came to these topics, where you started out, what you saw as your intellectual project in the eighties, in the nineties?

Milton Mueller:

What was happening in the eighties was a process that you would have to call liberalization of communications. You had a series of national monopolies on telecommunications in the US. The monopoly was being broken up and competition was being introduced. And in Europe you had them being privatized. They used to be state-owned enterprises that were being privatized and then subjected to competition. And the same was true of the mass media. You had a fairly oligopolistic restricted monopoly on broadcast media in the US and in Europe you had national public service broadcasters. And again, that whole environment, that whole ecosystem was massively diversified. It was commercialized and you had what many people call the process of neoliberal globalization going on, and I thought that was very exciting and very important and a change comparable to the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the industrial economy. And so I thought, "I'm going to track this." And yeah, I just kept getting bigger and bigger, so I've been running along watching it for many years now.

Justin Hendrix:

Of course, this is the right time to publish this book in a way, so much has happened and yet as you note, we are moving into what appears to be a very different period. You say public policy has now become anti-global protectionist in both the economic and the social sense. You have this sense of running through global politics of power, pulling back to polls. In a way, it does feel like we're in a very different moment than the one you described.

Milton Mueller:

We are. And again, it's a reactionary period in the sense that we went through this globalization process and this liberalization process, and now a lot of people are upset with the results and they are reverting back to these older forms of control, nationalistic control, protectionism and so on. But of course, we cannot actually go back. And when you start thinking about it, what it would really mean to go back to say national monopolies on telecommunication, actually nobody really wants to do that. And we need to be a bit more appreciative of the incredible accomplishments of that liberalization period. But definitely we are in a period of reaction against it.

Justin Hendrix:

This book concerns itself with a question around who controls internet registries and the drama that played out over ICANN in particular, but it is littered with lots of acronyms. So for the reader who's not been following all of this stuff, we've got of course ICANN, we've got IETF, we've got IANA related there, we've got DNS, and we've got all the various technical jargon, et cetera. I don't know, when you set out to explain this to someone at a bus stop, what do you say to them? How do you situate them in this constellation or set of constellations of entities and processes and working groups and other types of entities?

Milton Mueller:

Yeah, that's the toughest question. So when I first started writing about the DNS wars, that was precisely the problem that I confronted right off the bat is first you have to explain what is the DNS. And then you get into this highly technical description of the naming of computers and their function on the network. And yeah, people's eyes can easily glaze over. I think now with the massive awareness of the importance of social media, information technology, semiconductors, all of this digital technology, how much it permeates our lives, I think it's easier to explain this fundamentally is about the digitization of society and what are the governance mechanisms that we use.

And then you need to bring home the people the idea that the fundamental governance institution that we relied on for about a century maybe two centuries, that is to say the nation state that is being transformed by this digital technology. And so that's the avenue that you use to get into that. And then the ICANN story, the IANA registries is a good, in some ways it's like a tip of an iceberg, right. It's like we fought that battle over how those things would be governed incredibly intensely given how obscure those functions seem for 20 years. And in some ways it's still controversial at the global level, but in other ways the issue was resolved when we finally sort of privatized ICANN and got it out of the hands of the US government.

Justin Hendrix:

I like the way that you characterize this set of questions early in the book, write about this experiment, whether it succeeded or failed in terms of essentially trying to internationalize or to remove governance of ICANN from the United States. You say, "Latent in this question is a bigger one. Is a world system based on territorial state sovereignty, immutable, or is it changing as globe straddling technologies and overlapping jurisdictional boundaries become a more prominent part of our lives? What does it mean to govern the global interactions of digital technologies?" It feels like a very big project. This is an enormous history of the specifics of the debate, particularly over the ICANN experiment. And yet we've got similar things happening now around all these other digital technologies that you reference here, whether it's AI or crypto or social media. We've moved into a range of other types of governance and policy debates, but this was the original model for it, I suppose.

Milton Mueller:

It was a model. Yes. And it was one that was conceived in a very optimistic moment, right. When we all believed that the internet was this great thing and that it should be free and that we could innovate in the way we govern it, that we could come up with completely new institutions. And that's where we get this reference to declaring independence in cyberspace because that was the John Perry Barlow meme that we ourselves are the sovereign, the inhabitants, the users of cyberspace are the sovereigns. And it's no longer about nation states, and in the past 10 years, it's become very common to scoff at Barlow's declaration and say, "That never really happened. Governments are still very powerful, and of course they are." But in fact, something did happen. We did create this new institution. It was independent of nation states. We went through a 15 to 20 year struggle over that, and I participated in that and watched it firsthand, and it was... I just think it's unappreciated how significant that was.

And now I think as we go into let's say AI governance or crypto governance, in many ways we're dealing with the same problem, which is we have this globalized infrastructure, which is very difficult for a territorial institution to control. And at the same time, these territorial states are too militaristic and nationalistic to cooperate with each other to create global governance. So how are we going to govern these things and what role is market forces going to play relative to political or governmental forces? So it's still an open question on a variety of fronts, digital identity, digital money, artificial intelligence, applications, it's all still being worked out.

Justin Hendrix:

So take me back to the beginning of that 15-year fight. You talk about ICANN's creation in 1998, you say, "It was provoked by a crisis over a seemingly simple registry policy decisions. Should new names be added to the list of top level domain names?" I remember this moment folks were excited about all the new top-level domain names that might come to be. Take me back to this moment and explain to the listener what was going on. Why did this moment matter?

Milton Mueller:

Well, you have to go back to the internet technical community. The sort of computer scientists who were developing what became the IETF. And suddenly the internet went from this sort of military-funded research project into the education and research network community. And from that, it became open to the public. So all of these functions of domain name governance were being performed by computer scientists who were extremely good people and extremely technically competent, but they were making policy decisions about markets, about regulation, and about trademark and domain name conflicts.

So that was just this incongruous situation that you needed a new institution to govern this registry, the domain name system registry, and for reasons that got mixed up, not only with the fairly small economics of domain names, who would get in the business, how much money would they make, but also there was this wider question about who would control the internet. And it was like the domain name system was seen as this one centralized point of control. And so people were concerned not just with domain name governance, but with internet governance more broadly. And that's why so much political and social attention turned to this battle over the domain name system.

Justin Hendrix:

Tell me more about how ICANN came to be and what this entity actually was when it first came along in the late nineties.

Milton Mueller:

For that, you have to go to something called the framework for Global Electronic Commerce, which was this seminal policy document issued by the Clinton administration in 1996 and 1997, I think it was formally released in '97, but it was being developed through '96. So that was this remarkable document in which the Clinton administration said, "We don't want the internet to be regulated in a traditional way. We don't want it to be subject to national state regulation, and we don't want it to be subject to intergovernmental institutions like the ITU. What we'd like to see is a globalized, contractually governed space, which we think will be freer and more open and make the internet more prosperous in the way it develops."

So they issued this in '96, and that became the blueprint for ICANN. So they said, "We're not going to establish a formal regulation or a formal institution from the government to control the IANA registries. We're going to let the internet community itself figure out how to do this." And so they said, "It's all yours. Kids go off in a room and form a non-profit corporation that everybody agrees is the right one to do this." And that was, let's just say it was a kind of a power vacuum, and it was an exciting, idealistic and interesting process by which this truly transnational community of people who were involved with the internet were just literally going to meetings and arguing about how this all should be governed.

Now, ICANN itself was trying to build on the legacy of John Postel. So they said, "He's going to be our leader." And then Postel assembled a group of board members around him, somewhat secretly, somewhat arbitrarily, and then they suddenly announced, "Here's ICANN." We're the ones. And that didn't go over so well at the beginning because everybody said, you have this power, but how are you kept accountable? And many members of the community, including me, were saying, "You should actually have your board members elected and the internet society and the people who supported ICANN really hated that idea." So we were having a debate about global democracy in effect in governments. And the Commerce Department said, "We agree with the Democrats. We think that you should have a membership that would play some role in electing a board ICANN. So we're going to approve you as the one, the great organization that's going to take this over, but you really have to create a membership and you have to have some accountability mechanisms."

Justin Hendrix:

Well, you write here that despite, I suppose, that effort, that ICANN evaded true accountability for years. As a substitute, it offered endless forms of participation, open working groups, review committees, comment periods, advisory committees. I still feel like I regularly interact with the sort of ghosts of all of this activity today.

Milton Mueller:

That's exactly right. You had a corporate legal department that considered their mission to protect ICANN as a corporation from sort of disruptive external influences, and for that reason, and this wasn't entirely unreasonable, but it was taken to an extreme. They resisted any form of elected board members. And so they delayed it for three years and then they reduced the number of board members who would be elected. And then after we had an election, and there were critical board members elected, as we all expected, there were people who really wanted, people like Larry Lessig or Carl Auerbach who were critics of ICANN, somebody like Andy Muller-Maguhn, who was a member of the Chaos Computer Club, they got elected to the board. And so then board basically isolated them and kept them out of the decision-making process, and eventually ICANN just eliminated elections, which they had the power to do. So the accountability problem was just deferred and avoided for many years.

Justin Hendrix:

You point to this period around 2012 as the beginning of a series of major catalytic events. Take me forward in time to 2012, things are beginning to change. And I suppose there's one particular event that chills the conversation around the US role in the internet.

Milton Mueller:

The background to this is that ICANN was so chaotic in those early years and so lacking in general consensus, and people did not trust it to do the right thing. So the US government said, "We can't turn this over. We can't let go of it yet. We're kind of the real authority here, so we're going to do that." And they hung onto it. And that created kind of an international policy crisis in the sense that governments in the rest of the world said, "You created this governance institution and you have all power over it, and we have none, and this isn't the way we are supposed to do things."

So we had a big debate about sovereignty and about the US control in the World Summit on the Information Society and the World Summit essentially did not resolve that issue. And so it carried on and in various international organizations from then on, there would always be this debate about, "Why is the US in control of ICANN? You said it's a multi-stakeholder, private sector based organization, but you've got a government on top of it." So what happened in 2012 at the end of 2012, and then the beginning of 2013 was two things. Number one, there was an international conference by the ITU about how to revise the international telecommunication regulations. And at that conference, the rest of the world's governments were beating the US over the head with the contradiction between their multi-stakeholder idea and the fact that the US government had this special power over it.

So somehow the US administration became convinced that the best way to resolve this contradiction was in fact to do what they had promised to do in the first place, which was fully let go of ICANN and make it an independent non-governmental institution. And of course, what happened shortly after that were the Snowden revelations, which the rest of the world was like, "Oh my God, the US is really in control of the internet or they're abusing the internet." So that further created pressure on the US to really let go of ICANN.

Justin Hendrix:

You say that US control of ICANN did not intersect with the NSA's global surveillance program, but it was fair or not entirely unfair, you say for the two to be linked politically. What else can you say about the kind of vestiges of the Snowden affair, how much it warped or shaped the politics of the internet at the time?

Milton Mueller:

Very much sort of revived the idea of technological sovereignty. So other nations looking at this US dominance over certain key internet institutions over the surveillance mechanisms said, "Maybe we need need to have more national power over the internet itself." But at the same time the idea of getting the US out became much more popular both among civil society and among other governments, like, the Brazilians for example, or the Europeans, where the Brazilians would say something like, "We're supporters of sovereignty, but if you're going to create a multi-stakeholder institution and be consistent about it and you get out to United States."

So we had this fantastic event called the NETmundial, in which the Brazilians sponsored a multi-stakeholder conference in which we all came together and talked about how to do this transition and how to also protect ourselves against state surveillance on the internet. And incidentally, one of the key things that had kept the US in control was that nobody, again trusted ICANN to be accountable. So as part of the transition process, there was an agreement which the US government in the most praiseworthy way said, "You're right. We have to reform ICANN's institutional structure. We have to make it accountable." So that will be a condition of the transition. We're not going to just set it free. It also has to reform its accountability structures. And so coming out of that transition, we got a complete overhaul of ICANN's bylaws and accountability structures.

Justin Hendrix:

You called the NETmundial, the kind of peak of multi-stakeholderism. And I still feel like this word comes under the pages of the Tech Policy Press all the time. There's a kind of lionization of multi-stakeholderism in approaches to tech policy generally. What did the peak of multi-stakeholderism mean?

Milton Mueller:

It meant that sort of the ideology or the principle of multi-stakeholder participation was at its strongest at that time. And at that time that meant not just allowing civil society and business into UN processes, but it meant allowing governments into a new status within ICANN. So it was everybody's a stakeholder, all stakeholders are supposed to be equal. And so we went into the NETmundial and they had a very nice arrangement where in the floor when you wanted to speak, you lined up under one of three lines and every line got equal status. So if you were in the government line, they would take turns with the civil society and the business line. And so you had a real attempt to enforce the equal status of different stakeholder groups at NETmundial.

Justin Hendrix:

Despite all this activity, despite the general kind of, I guess, agreement in the community, the right thing to do is to figure out how to create something certainly free of US government control folks in the US weren't so sure. You talk about this sort of dense network of lobbying organizations and civil society groups and of course government agencies, et cetera, this kind of borg of ideas about how the internet should work that still tried to keep its hands in the pot.

Milton Mueller:

Definitely, definitely. So the US, our whole policy community had been this big supporter of what they called the multi-stakeholder model. And they were always attuned to and very susceptible to charges that the ITU was trying to take over the internet or the Russians were trying to take over, the Chinese were trying to take over the internet. And then when it became time for the US government to get rid of its control of that part of the internet, suddenly, I don't know, half of that community said, "Wait a minute. No, no, no. Why should we give this up?" And so we had a very interesting debate between what I would call now the tech nationalists and the globalists and the Obama administration was supporting the original model of ICANN, it would be this privatized nonprofit that would govern the internet registries and the US needed to get out of it in order to create this legitimacy for it in the worldwide basis.

And then you had Ted Cruz and the nationalists saying, "This is the Obama administration giving up control of the internet to Russia and China, and this is going to result in censorship of the internet and we've been protecting the freedom of the internet," and blah, blah, blah. So we had this really interesting confrontation in the Congress and we succeeded in completing the transition with the support of the internet community overwhelmingly, but also with the support of both Democrats and some Republicans in Congress because at that time the sort of MAGA-type nationalists were very much in the minority in the Senate.

Justin Hendrix:

When you think about this history of the US role in trying to advance internet freedom and the claims about speech and democracy and the rest of those things, I guess when you fast-forward to today, the US clearly has very much pulled back from trying to advance those things, just in the last few months under the Trump administration, it seems to be no longer on the agenda for the United States in terms of its foreign policy. I don't know, what does it tell you about retrospectively about that fight, whether it was on the level?

Milton Mueller:

Well, it's very clear, yes, that the MAGA Republicans are a little bit two-faced about the whole freedom of speech issue, right. It was useful when they were positioning themselves against foreigners, but if they were, it's clear that the Trump administration and certain Republicans were using, just look at what they're trying to do to Harvard, for example, or arresting students for speaking out on the Palestine issue or the various kinds of interferences with freedom of speech, the attack on the law firm, the attack on certain broadcast media by the FCC, it's very questionable how consistent their devotion to freedom of expression is. But I have to correct you on one thing. So the drift away from US support for internet freedom actually started in Trump administration one with the proposals for bans on WhatsApp and TikTok, and was actually not slowed down, maybe even accelerated during the Biden administration because the Biden administration started all of these executive orders about untrustworthy apps, the laws about Huawei and about untrusted Chinese kinds of equipment and services. So we were securitizing internet governance for probably from 2018 on consistently.

Justin Hendrix:

The Biden administration was trying to have its cake and eat it too. It was trying to securitize and nationalize on the one hand, but also make this declaration on the future of internet freedom and kind of advance this pro-democracy agenda alongside it. I guess [inaudible 00:30:29]-

Milton Mueller:

That's a very good way to put it, have their cake and eat it too. So the declaration for the future of the internet spearheaded by Tim Wu was like, we want a free and an open internet, but only with trusted countries." And Tim Wu later came out in favor of the TikTok ban, which really shocked me, but it's not inconsistent with the whole Biden administration approach to things. It's like we want at least pay lip service to these freedom principles, but when it comes down to key trade and free flow of information issues, if the Chinese are involved or if an adversary of ours is involved, then that all goes out the window.

Justin Hendrix:

Well, you state in this book on multiple occasions that the point of telling the story, the point of going back and digging into all these acronyms and all of this history is to understand what it can tell us about the future of technology governance. You write late in the book, "Today, there are no bold visions of new governance institutions. There is no confidence in the ability of people to govern themselves. There is fear and loathing of the results of the digital economy due to its alleged concentration of market power, impact on privacy and the spread of disinformation and misinformation. There are angry defensive reactions against digital media, technology businesses and technology itself." You go on. I understand the sort of need to maybe slightly problematize some of the reaction to what's going on over the last couple of decades. Yet on the other hand, some of those things of course, are your real phenomena, real threats to society. I don't know, what do you make of, or what's the answer here in terms of how we should think about governance in the face of technology harms?

Milton Mueller:

Yeah, I think that's very valid approach. We do... It's like people had an unrealistic optimism before and now they have an unrealistic pessimism. It's like when they were optimistic, they thought, "Oh, if we tie everybody together, there's not going to be any social problems. There's not going to be bad actors. There's not going to be creeps who abuse these capabilities or try to steal money using them." Of course there are. And so what we've got is really simply a transitioning of general kinds of social problems into this new cyberspace. And again, the point was that we could solve those problems with new governance institutions that were more congruent with the internet. We would come up with a global governance structure. We would have international representation and participation. We would have accountability, but we would solve these problems by creating a new institution rather than this fragmented, territorial, state-based form of governance.

So it's not like people who believe in these new institutions don't think we need governance and don't think we have problems. It's just a question of how those problems get addressed. And I think the optimism of... I am more sympathetic to the optimism of the late nineties than I am to this absurd pessimism and this belief that somehow regulation or state-directed regulation can solve all these problems when we know first of all that states are the cause of many of these problems. And secondly, that state-based governance institutions have all the same problems of imbalance and monopoly power and so on that non-state actors have.

We just need to do a better job of thinking about what are the institutional solutions to some of these problems. And I agree that there was a certain naivete about certain aspects of multi-stakeholderism that if you just got more people to participate, everything would be better. Participation costs money. Participation takes time. And only specialists and the businesses who make money doing this end up having the time and money to invest in participating in governance processes at that level. So of course, those kinds of things are going to be somewhat distorted in their effects.

Justin Hendrix:

You talk about this idea of equilibrium, I suppose, equilibrium between the state, between technology governance, between technology firms. Sometimes I feel like that's what we're bargaining about here a little bit. It's like, "Where's the power? Is there an equilibrium? Are there other equilibria that inform whether this particular equilibrium makes sense?" I don't know if that makes sense. But the Europeans to some extent, they seem to have a generally better equilibrium with regard to the way they conduct themselves when it comes to tech regulation and trying to advance a social agenda through their regulatory intervention.

I don't know that it makes their regulation necessarily work better or what have you, but there's at least a consensus there about what to do on some of these things. Whereas here in the US we seem to yo-yo all over the place on these things. And more lately, at least from my own perspective, certainly glad we haven't put a lot more power in the hands of the state when it comes to regulating these things. But I don't know if you lay out these different types of scenarios for how we might think about internet governance going forward, but what do those tell us about maybe how to think about some of these other governance problems, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, et cetera.

Milton Mueller:

Kind of disagree that the Europeans have a good equilibrium. I think what they have is a little too complacent and comfortable equilibrium in the short term, but as they're discovering their regulatory environment, which is still very state-directed, they never liberalized as much as the US in most areas. It's pretty static, right. They're discovering we don't really have a digital economy and a lot of their regulatory measures are easier for them to do because the companies are foreign, right. They're not European companies. And a lot of the innovation that has come out of Europe and it does happen there is just migrates to the US in terms of their business headquarters or their capital.

And we see China doing incredible amounts of innovation despite the overbearing monopoly of the Communist party. And again, that's going to cost them in the long term. So I think we do need what you call a better balance between market forces and regulatory forces, but we don't know exactly where it's going to come from because it's not going to come from the nation-state, and it doesn't look like it can come from an agreement among nation-states, and it doesn't look like purely multi-stakeholder. Private institutions are able to assert hard forms of regulation on some of these activities. So I don't know where that's going, but that's exactly what we're working on at the internet Governance project is like, "What is the path forward? How do we move forward from here?"

Justin Hendrix:

Let me ask you maybe to lay out at least one of your scenarios. You talk a lot about the US rivalry with China. The possibility of a total decoupling in this scenario. Strikes me we're already good ways down that path, but I don't know, where do you see things headed?

Milton Mueller:

Yeah, I think that the combination of the prior eight years of incremental decoupling between US and China and now Trump's tariff explosion is really attacking the fundamentals of globalization. And I think unfortunately, we're going to learn very quickly within the next three or four years how bad that is for general prosperity for people's lives. And if it doesn't result in a war which these kinds of tariff decouplings tend to do, if you look at history, if it doesn't result in a war, then it could result in a renewed commitment to some form of global cooperation, at least in the tech sector. I think the businesses have to play a bigger role in advancing a vision of how they will see this. They can't be lured into this protectionism because that's going to cut off their nose despite their fate.

I think Apple is in good position, a very revealing position in terms of the tensions here. "Okay, we're a global company. We're based in the US, the intellectual property all in the US, but the production is partly in China, we're going to have to globalize that, but we're not deglobalizing. Or if we really try to do that, it's going to be a disaster." So the question is how do you adjust globalization to these nation-state conflicts and how do you deal with problems like immigration and the free flow of information in an environment where there's, it's just so scaled up and so many more people are participating than we had anticipated that the political problems are different than what we imagined.

Justin Hendrix:

A lot of folks right now, these issues of sovereignty, of kind of data sovereignty of wanting to own and control infrastructure or at least require companies to house their infrastructure in the geography where a nation-state can have, I guess, the ability to pull the plug or do some other form of oversight if they have to. It feels to me like AI just pours gas on all of that, that governments are going to want even more control and more sovereignty.

Milton Mueller:

No, I think AI sort of erodes that in various ways because, particularly, the open source approaches to it are just like people say, "Oh, we don't want DeepSeek in our country, but it's okay. It's here and it's spreading because it's open source. Anybody can copy it. What are you going to do about that AI? Again, it's just the digital ecosystem. It's just internet governance accelerated to the point where every single application and industrial process can be affected by that. And again, the idea that we have to territorialize that, something that was built on a globalized infrastructure, on globalized data resources, on the free flow of data, it's just not viable. There's just too much of a contradiction between the technological potential and the political barriers that are going to be put into place.

Justin Hendrix:

I'm not sure we disagree. I don't know. I feel like I see many countries trying to move towards attempting to have more sort of sovereign control in the face of AI. Look at EuroStack and the kind of tech sovereignty movement there and things of that nature that sort of mixed with a bit of, "We can't trust the US, we can't trust these American tech firms," put that in a pot and stir it, and you end up with more concern, more sovereignty as a fundamental motivation.

Milton Mueller:

Oh yeah. You're totally right about that. There is a dynamic there that if the Europeans assert sovereignty, then it reinforces US efforts to have tariffs and retaliation against Europe. And when the US tries to exclude China from its market, then it encourages self-reliance initiatives and things in China and various forms of retaliation that cut the US off. So there's a dynamic there that, like I say, it's going to have to play out until we discover how stupid this is. It's just like we're going to learn that is not productive. We're not going to get traditional manufacturing jobs back in the US by building tariff walls and Europe is not going to get a EuroStack. If stack is global, it will remain global. The internet is global, crypto is global. The data flows are global. It has political appeal to talk about this tech nationalism, but in practice, in operational reality, it just doesn't work.

Justin Hendrix:

The United Nations seems to want to have much more of a say these days in these conversations about internet governance. It's really making a play.

Milton Mueller:

We're having conversations about that a lot now going into the Oslo IGF and the renewal of the World Summit process. My take is very disheartening one for UN advocates. It's that the UN is not relevant and never really has been relevant to the main policy debates about the digital ecosystem. And so when it does something like the global digital compact or its AI initiatives, it's really just trying to manufacture some kind of relevance that is not going to be there until and unless the powerful nation states decide they want to use the UN to create a treaty or an institutional structure that they use to regulate digital technology.

But there's no sign that they're going to do that because again, as I've been saying, somewhat monotonously, the nation states can't really agree because of national security and economic tensions among them. So the UN is really in a weak position right now, and we really kind of have to reassess whether even the Internet Governance Forum is the proper place to be discussing internet Governance and digital governance because it's under these auspices where you're getting in the UN bureaucracy and you're not really having any regulatory leverage on anything.

Justin Hendrix:

If you go back in time and you remember that idealism that you started out with, that ideal project to connect the world and to try to empower individuals, et cetera. As you say, it seems like we've moved far off that at the moment and maybe headed into a darker place. But do you hang on to any of that? Do you think we can course-correct, steer back towards the more optimistic visions of folks like John Perry Barlow?

Milton Mueller:

Absolutely. I totally hang on to the idea of transnationalism, of getting beyond nationalism and trying to think of the digital ecosystem and the economy as a global planetary thing. And I don't think that's wild-eyed idealism. I just think that so many of the problems we have are transnational in nature. Everything from climate change to digital governance. The idea that we can actually build new institutions that can deal with these problems, I think it's essential to retain that level of idealism because if you don't, then what do you have left? You have power struggles among Putin and Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. That's not a very attractive vision for me anyway.

Justin Hendrix:

Professor Milton Mueller, Declaring Independence in Cyberspace. Internet Self-Governance and the End of US Control of ICANN, out from MIT Press this month. Thank you very much.

Milton Mueller:

Thank you, Justin.