How a decades-old tech battle remains as relevant today as ever

Nearly three decades ago, the United States government began relinquishing control over an obscure but crucial bit of internet bureaucracy: overseeing the assignment of the names and numbers, allowing computers and networks worldwide to find and talk to one another.

This shift eventually resulted in a novel form of global governance that has since helped largely shield the internet from national and geopolitical pressure. But the transition from U.S. control to a global stakeholder governance model was not without intense backlash, according to Milton L. Mueller, a professor in Georgia Tech’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy.

“What seemed small and technical turned out to be very big and political,” Mueller writes in “Declaring Independence in Cyberspace,” his new book on the history and lessons of this pivotal moment in internet history.

It’s a story that Mueller says has particular relevance today amid global concerns over how best to address the growing influence of artificial intelligence on our lives and work.

Going global

Mueller’s book focuses on the establishment of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), created by the U.S. government in 1998 to replace an informal U.S.-led system with a private-sector-led international model.

During the 1990s, policymakers recognized the need for change amid rapid commercialization and globalization of the internet. The informal system run by technical researchers had proved inadequate for burgeoning policy disputes, according to Mueller.

In response, the U.S. set up ICANN as a private-sector manager of the internet’s address book to provide a more formalized structure.

Initially, the U.S. Department of Commerce retained oversight. However, in 2014, under intense international pressure, the agency announced it would relinquish that role in favor of a framework in which ICANN was accountable only to global internet stakeholders.

The decision came amid international criticism of the U.S. over internet surveillance activities revealed by Edward Snowden and consequent doubts over the ability of the U.S. to serve as a neutral steward. A deep divide between advocates of state-centric approaches to internet governance and those who supported multistakeholder approaches also contributed to the debate.

A ‘Crowning achievement’

The U.S. decision to give up control sparked a domestic political firestorm driven by those who emphasized the U.S. role in inventing and paying for the initial development of the internet. Opponents of the change argued that the U.S. had a duty to continue as a steward to act as a shield protecting internet freedom from potential interference by authoritarian countries such as China, Russia, and Iran.

It took two years, but the administration of President Barack Obama overcame the opposition by highlighting broad internet-community support for the change as well as positioning the newly independent ICANN as a bulwark against undue influence from countries that wanted a more direct role for governments.

The newly independent ICANN began operating without any U.S. government oversight in 2016.

Mueller—a long-time observer and participant in internet governance processes—argues the move towards a multistakeholder model was “one of the crowning achievements (or [the] last gasp?) of neoliberal globalization.”

A ‘clearly preferable’ alternative

“The story has a moderately happy ending,” Mueller notes in his book. “The new ICANN realized, to some degree, the radical vision of Internet registry governance via non-state actors. That option now seems clearly preferable to the alternatives,” Mueller writes.

Since becoming independent of the U.S., ICANN has demonstrated neutrality in the face of geopolitical pressures such as its refusal to remove Russian domain names from the internet following the invasion of Ukraine, according to Mueller.

However, challenges do persist. Mueller points to ICANN’s often cumbersome domain name policymaking, its slow response to rules such as Europe’s General Data Privacy Regulation, and controversies such as the attempted sale of the .org registry, which highlighted issues of accountability and the influence of its U.S. jurisdiction.

Mueller’s work underscores the crucial role of Carter School and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts in fostering the interdisciplinary expertise needed to navigate such complex global issues.

Lessons for AI governance

For instance, the history of ICANN offers potent lessons for today’s heated debates over how to regulate artificial intelligence, Mueller argues in his book’s conclusion.

“AI now occupies the same prominent place in the public imagination as the Internet did back in the mid-1990s,” accompanied by similar widespread anxieties and urgent calls for government regulation, sometimes framed in almost apocalyptic terms, Mueller writes.

In the book, Mueller cautions against assumptions that state control is the best response to concerns over AI’s potentially pernicious influence. This, he says, is because nations will often weaponize technologies or prioritize surveillance opportunities over public good.

The ICANN experiment, while imperfect, demonstrates the potential for non-state actors and the global community to responsibly manage critical infrastructure while largely insulating it from geopolitical conflict, he argues.

Instead of reacting solely with “intensified national governmental controls,” Mueller suggests that exploring diverse governance models—perhaps involving multistakeholder principles, industry self-regulation, or new transnational arrangements—might be better for managing concerns related to AI while preserving innovation and mitigating the risks of purely state-centric control.

“The story told here suggests that we might address the governance problems posed by this evolving system with a more confident vision of human-technical possibilities, as happened in 1998,” Mueller writes.