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  • Introduction
  • Heidi J. S. Tworek (bio) and Simone M. Müller (bio)

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Carter and Reagan administrations created a new approach to exerting national power vis-à-vis the Soviet Union that actively acknowledged information as a vital component of national security. By 2000, the approach had become a concrete national security strategy for U.S. active engagement abroad, known through the acronym of DIME: diplomatic, informational, military, and economic power. 1 The national security framework now explicitly equated the “I” of information with the D, M, and E of diplomacy, military, and economics in the international realm. But governments and businesses have implicitly linked international information to military, diplomatic, and economic power since at least the mid-nineteenth century through international conferences and organizations. While the revelations about the NSA have made these connections clearer to all over the past two years, the mechanisms underlying such information, in this case Internet governance, actually arose over 150 years ago.

This special issue examines historical attempts of statesmen, administrators, reformers, and business elites to control or manage the contentious realm of international communications during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In communications, existing laws regulate national spaces and have given rise to a wide array of different systems for content, use, and technology. However, these are compatible systems that interact constantly with each other because they rely fundamentally on the global coordination of technical standards. 2 Indeed, global communications undergird the [End Page 405] increasing integration and entanglement of our world, a process commonly known as globalization. Cross-border communications enable the movement of people, goods, and ideas around the world. Yet while international communications have fostered globalization, globalization has not led to comprehensive governance of cross-border information networks.

Our special issue tackles this irony in international communications policy and explores its historical origins. The more recent convergence of international Internet telecommunications standards has occurred partially through the idea of “network power,” meaning “the power that a successful standard possesses when it enables cooperation among members of a network.” 3 Our special issue unpacks exactly how and why standards became the avenue to create cooperation in the first place. At present, when sovereign states have started to question global Internet governance, this special issue seeks to understand how such forms of governance emerged in the first place and emphasizes the contested nature of their origins.

More broadly, the telecommunications sector provides one avenue into understanding the role of technical standards in international governance, business practices, and globalization processes. Whether through the size of containers in shipping or patent exchange agreements, standards often facilitated international interaction in a manner that has generally gone unnoticed. Standards also show us that international regimes do not always arise simply from an export of national models. Rather, international negotiations over standards can shape the domestic political economy of particular services and goods.

The five articles in this special issue trace the development of such standard-setting in the realm of global communications, starting with the post and moving through telegraphy, radio, and satellite. We explore how and why certain groups succeeded in creating global standards at particular moments. The special issue presents two main arguments. First, we argue that international coordination of technical standards has historically succeeded over and above any attempts to regulate content or the users of communications technology. Second, we argue that these technical standards have proven highly durable for communications, in particular because communications infrastructures are so path-dependent.

We address these arguments by using the concept of global governance, meaning “the sum of laws, norms, policies, and institutions that define, constitute, and mediate transborder relations between states, cultures, citizens, intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, and the market.” 4 The idea of global governance enables us to examine a wider range of [End Page 406] attempts to create international communications policy, whether through international legislation and regulation, through coordination, or through technical standard-setting. We also include a broader array of historical actors, namely states, businesses, and nongovernmental organizations. Since the mid-nineteenth century, these three main sets of actors have sought to coordinate the technology of communications or its use, and indeed, have battled over technical...

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