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Scope, Change and Complexity:
Understanding and Shaping Globe Spanning
Electronic Networks

Review by
Stephen D. McDowell
Florida State University

Governing Global Electronic Networks: International Perspectives on Policy and Power, edited by William J. Drake and Ernest J. Wilson III.  Cambridge, Massachusetts.  MIT Press, 2008.  978-0-262-04251-2.  677 pp.

The design, deployment and use of electronic communication technologies confounds many efforts, whether to understand how the industries built upon the application of these capabilities are organized, or what approaches to public guidance, governance, or regulation of these activities are desirable, necessary, or even feasible.   Like the web of telecommunications and information technologies, the networks of firms, policy researchers, and the governing groups and institutions that together facilitate and sometimes constraint online activities are also worldwide in scope.  The rapid pace of change in information and communication technology has long been cited as the core reason why traditional regulatory institutions are not up to the task of coordination and management of the communication and technology sectors.  Multiple and concurrent understandings of technology, economics, law, international organization, and social and cultural studies seem to be required to begin to get a grip on a variety of complex questions.  At the same time, convergence in the production, delivery and use of telecommunications, audiovisual, and information and database services is claimed to mean that these sectors should all be treated together.  This is a hefty challenge for policy research alone, let alone for governance.

William Drake and Ernest Wilson bring together in this edited collection some of the most experienced policy analysts in the area of governance of activities based on electronic networks, or the arrangements coordinating the networks themselves.  The first section of the book dealing with infrastructure includes chapters touching on the International Telecommunication Union, global management of the radio magnetic spectrum, organizing the use of spectrum to provide wireless telecommunications services, and international trade and investment in telecommunication services.  The second section, dealing with networked information communication and commercial applications, includes chapters on audiovisual services, content issues in mass media and the internet, cooperation among states in addressing online criminal activity, privacy, and intellectual property rights.  The third section explores the participation on non-dominant stakeholders in global network governance.  While the strengths of the book are in the attention paid to interactive networks and network-based services, the collection also includes mass media and cultural dimensions. 

The book takes a holistic view, focusing on both comprehensive and detailed treatments of specific issue areas while drawing links to the institutional contexts and other problems and policy challenges.   This is difficult to accomplish, given the value placed on specialized expertise and more narrow research programs in public and private organizations and in scholarly institutions.

It outlines the “principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures and programs,” that are in place or emerging, what are often called the regimes for international communication.  Research on network governance is not just about the issues, it is also about the institutions and processes that shape the scope of public tasks and goals, who is involved, how participation is organized, how research and knowledge are created, organized and applied to policy questions, and how decisions are made.  We must also consider the types of outcomes that arise from these processes, whether changing levels of awareness, agenda setting, legitimacy, or actual rules and policies.  The collection is unique in that it covers both the activities and questions that constitute challenges for governing global information and communication networks, but also includes detailed and careful considerations and evaluation of the processes of governance. 

Overall, the collection shows the importance of international organizations and knowledge of their responsibilities and activities, which transpire over long periods of time, and are either opaque to seem too complex outsiders or non-experts.  It also underlines the difficulties of tracking and understanding policy development across multiple international organizations.  The book itself arises from a project that includes a group of scholars and experts who have the support and knowledge to participate in and follow these processes, but more importantly who try to bring light on these connected issues, to tell the story to the broader academic community and public, and to highlight the concerns of non-dominant actors.  The group of authors here represents a range of perspectives and geographical and social vantage points, which is important for a subject matter that is core to many political, economic, social and cultural processes. These efforts are a crucial part of more responsive and accountable governance in this sector at the national level, but are even more salient at the international level, as the work of civil society groups at the two World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) conferences showed.

The collection also confronts a technologically determinist approach to governance or the lack of it in electronic networks.  The careful discussion reminds the reader that policy venues and choices are available to guide online activities and behavior (even if limited), and that choices about market organization, technology applications, speech, content, privacy, crime and security are being made by states and international organizations despite some claims and resulting popular conceptions that these activities take place in a non-state space or are fundamentally ungovernable. 

Rather than just describing these processes and issues, the book is oriented toward enhancing the participation of groups and actors that do not have the resources, institutional capacity or standing to participate fully in governance processes, but are affected by these outcomes.  The developing or less developed countries are the largest group here, but these groups also includes civil society organizations working across national borders who argue that citizen interests are not always served in international forums where most often states and governments have the main standing.  The practices and policies that constitute governance arise from a broader political economy, and like developing countries, the book reminds us that it is necessary to ask whose interests are being served by these governance arrangements and outcomes.  These policy choices are spread across a wide range of questions, including making rules about less visible elements of our communication environment such as spectrum allocation or technical standards.

While many policy researchers object to the use of the term governance, arguing that it is too ambiguous and does not provide for a sufficiently clear definition of the subject matter under investigation, it is hard to think of concepts that are adequate to encompass such a diffuse topic area.  The term international organization has been used, as have terms such as institutions, regimes, or management.  In the closing chapter, Ernest Wilson returns to broader themes about the field and theory building in this area, and like the other chapters demonstrates a careful and thoughtful consideration of the challenges facing the organization of governance and policy research in this area.

The book engages in field building, initially through a delineation of historical periods, institutions and issues.  While there is an abundance of detail here, the project aims to consider a central set of questions and concepts.    William Drake provides a historical synthesis of three periods electronic network governance, or “NetWorld Orders”, which is an important field defining step.   Ernest Wilson reviews the set of questions that orient the project as well as the scope of challenges for the exploration of the governance of global electronic networks.  The book offers key contributions in this direction, by considering the rest of the world (outside the United States).  Non-dominant actors, both the issues of significance to them and their role in the governance process, are at the middle of its scope of inquiry.  This also points to consideration of questions about what international governance could be or possibly should be.