From the International Telegraph Union to Internet Governance: Organizational Vs. Viral Governance

Abstract: Established in 1865, the International Telegraph Union, which became the International Telecommunication Union in 1932, has been successful until the early 1990’s in being the core organization in the regulation and coordination of the global telecommunication infrastructure. However, the ITU missed to a large extent the Internet/Digital revolution. The governance of the global information infrastructure is presently in the hands of a wide, and often loose, network of state and non-state actors interacting in an on-going process of norms settlement taking place in various overlapping forums…in which the ITU is a simple stakeholder. The new context can be interpreted along three lines. The technological one would state that the decentralized logic of the Internet architecture marginalized the states in the regulatory game, as public regulations can be bypassed in many ways by the (united or not) users. The civic one relies on the idea that digital technologies are able to sustain new forms of more participative, horizontal, inclusive governance; the later being also characteristic of post-modern societies based on reflexive and multi-stakeholders governance. The last approach considers institutional arrangements as resulting from decentralized processes of promotion and of adhesions to common norms. The dynamic of the building of the governance systems that shape the (global) digital infrastructure and the information society, can largely be analyzed as the result of a process by which the US Federal Government and a network of others, hand-in-hand with a set of firms and non-state actors, played a strategy favoring the diffusion of technologies and economic models ensuring an enduring leadership