International Regimes for Information and Communication Technologies: Toward a New Research Agenda

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International Regimes for Information and
Communication Technologies Toward a New Research
Agenda

• Jeffrey Hart
• Indiana University
• October 13, 2006

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Governance

• Governance is a service that governments and
  other authoritative bodies perform
• Defined by Oran Young as The establishment and
  operation of social institutionscapable of
  resolving conflicts, facilitating cooperation,
  or, more generally, alleviating collective action
  problems.

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International Intergovernmental Regimes

• Defined as systems of rules, norms, procedures,
  and informal practices that constrain the
  behavior of governments of nation-states.
• International governance and international
  intergovernmental regimes are not the same
  because some international governance can occur
  with only minimal involvement of governments.

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Theories about International Regimes

• Hegemonial stability theory
• Regimes change when the distribution of
  international power changes regimes tend to
  favor hegemonial powers.
• Epistemic communities
• Regimes cannot emerge in the absence of consensus
  among activists and technical experts (e.g.,
  environmental regimes)
• Constructivism
• Regimes are artificial social constructions that
  do not necessarily depend on power distributions
  or scientific/technical consensus

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International Regimes for ICTs

• The Domain Name System
• E-Commerce
• Intellectual Property
• The Digital Divide

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The Domain Name System

• Origins in the system administered by Jon Postel
• Postel regime generalized into the IANA by the
  Internet Society
• IANA establishes ICANN in collusion with the US
  Department of Commerce
• ICANN comes under strong criticism for Commerce
  veto (EU Milton Mueller)

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DNS-Specific Issues

• Integrity of root server system
• Global Top-level domains vs. country domains
• Need to regulate registrar monopolies (Network
  Solutions/Verisign) or make registry industry
  more competitive
• Cybersquatting vs. trademark and brand-name
  protection of large firms (UDRP)
• .xxx domain dispute

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E-Commerce Governance Issues

• Should there be policies to promote migration
  from bricks and mortar to bricks and clicks or
  just clicks?
• How is e-commerce to be regulated?
• Is there a geographic location where the
  transaction takes place (for taxation purposes)
  and if so what tax is to be charged?

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Advantages of E-Commerce
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Internet as a Tax-Free Environment

• EU began to consider extending VAT to e-commerce
  (as did US states) in the late 1990s
• Clinton administration advocated tax-free zone in
  the WTO and the OECD
• OECD adopted Ottawa Taxation Framework Conditions
  (1998)
• Since then WTO has focused on liberalizing trade
  in digital products

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Intellectual Property Issues

• Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights
  (TRIPS) were negotiated as part of the Uruguay
  Round of trade talks
• TRIPS were unpopular especially in the Third
  World
• US entertainment, pharmaceutical, and software
  firms focused on international piracy
• Recent attempts on the part of the movie and
  recording industries to make file sharing
  software illegal if used to encourage piracy

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The Broadcast Flag

• Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG)
  study of June 2002
• Recommendation for a digital flag for protected
  DTV content
• DTV decoding devices would detect the flag and be
  unable to copy protected content or forward it to
  devices not properly configured to maintain
  protection

Is the broadcast flag a TIVO killer?
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The Digital Divide

• G8 adopted Okinawa Charter on Global Information
  Society in 2000
• DOT Force meetings and final report lead to
  various reports and programs and a
  multi-stakeholder approach to governance
• This approach continued in WSIS and now in the
  Internet Governance Forum

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Summing Up

• Past political science research tended to focus
  too much on the DNS and Digital Divide issues and
  their forums ICANN and WSIS
• Not enough attention was paid to e-commerce,
  intellectual property, other important governance
  matters and their forums the G8, WTO, and the
  OECD