Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance

2. Networks in Action

2 Network has become a trendy term. We are said to live in a networked society or, even more grandly, the network society.1 Instead of the wealth of nations, we read about the wealth of networks.2 Political scientists searching for new labels to describe the ferment in global governance have joined this parade. We hear of global public policy networks,3 transgovernmental networks,4 transnational advocacy networks,5 and networked governance.6 Like all pregnant metaphors, the network concept can be stretched too far or applied indiscriminately. The potential for insight—and confusion— is magnified in discussions of Internet governance because there we are addressing the very technological networks that have stimulated much of the theorizing. This has led to a profusion of overlapping and sometimes confusing applications.7 When we talk about “networks” are we talking about technologies, or societal organization, or both? Or are we simply projecting the latest metaphor into any and every kind of social relationship we can see? The recursive relationship between technological Networks in Action: Three Case Studies 1. Castells 1996. 2. Benkler 2006. 3. Reinicke 1997 and 1999–2000; Benner, Reinicke, and Witte 2000. 4. Eilstrup-Sangivanni 2009; Slaughter 2004; Raustiala 2002. 5. Keck and Sikkink 1998. 6. Sørenson and Torfing 2007; Kooiman 2003. 7. A selection from an academic work (Hudson 2001, 334) provides a typical example of the cascading application of the concept: “Castells (1996) argues that networks are central to the information age, while Moghadam (2000: 80) suggests that ‘the network form of transnational organizing may be the one most conducive to the era of globalization’. Although this may be a premature conclusion, many commentators would seem to concur, talking about digital networks (Sassen 2000), transnational business networks (Yeung 2000), knowledge networks (Sinclair 2000), citizens networks (Deibert 2000), transnational feminist networks (Moghadam 18 Chapter 2 networks, networks of actors, organizational networks, and governance institutions becomes an unavoidable theme in any discussion of what’s different about the Internet. Instead of beginning the book with a complicated and abstract discussion of networks in social science theory, I start with three concrete case studies. The incidents discussed in the following pages provide potent examples of the relationship between the Internet’s ability to connect information and people and how that can transform the political economy of communication and information. I have deliberately chosen messy examples, not simple ones. They are cases in which Internet-based activities overlap, intersect, or clash with governments and international governance processes in the kind of unformed spaces where new organizational models and practices can take root. Indymedia and the “Guantanamo Bay for ‘Terrorist’ Computer Hard Drives” The Independent Media Center (Indymedia) is an Internet-based news network. It produces news for antiglobalization protest-oriented activists and their supporters. Born in Seattle at the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests, it provided an alternative to what movement activists perceived as the biased coverage of events by the commercial mass media. From these origins Indymedia grew into a transnational network of autonomous media collectives, interlinked via the Web and a shared publishing platform. Be your own media is their motto. Indymedia epitomizes what some people like to refer to as the network form of organization : loosely structured, noncommercial, and nonhierarchical. With no central managers, no advertisers, a lot of volunteer labor, and some donations it has grown to 150 local centers in more than thirty different countries. This is where most stories about networks stop. But a thorough and realistic assessment of the global governance implications of this kind of networking can’t stop there. For it did not take long for Indymedia’s success at growing a network to collide with the demands of states. On 2000).” In this paragraph we see thrown into one gigantic pot the physical infrastructure for processing and transmitting information, Manuel Castells’s macrosocial characterization of a type of society, a generic technology of networking (digital networks), an organizational form, a coalition of activists around a particular ideology or issues, and business relationships among suppliers. Networks in Action 19 October 7, 2004, its Internet hosting provider, acting in response to a request from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), removed two hard drives from Indymedia servers. As a result, twenty Indymedia Web sites in thirteen different nations were suddenly offline. Confusion, secrecy, and a tangle of transnational connections surrounded the event. The hard...