Creating Global Internet Regulation: The Role of Technological Imageries.

This paper investigates the shape that global Internet regulation has taken in the context of the UN-initiated World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), and in particular in two 'multi-stakeholder' bodies that have played central roles in the reconfiguration of the regulatory principles and governance mechanisms pertaining to the Internet. The paper has two main goals. Firstly, to examine how the regulation of the Internet has emerged as an object of global governance in the context of the United Nations. Secondly, using a neo-Foucauldian governmentality perspective, to explore and explain how these UN-initiated regulatory activities have been driven and shaped by a cluster of concerns, principals and imageries about technological features of the Internet and its relationship to socio-political transformations. This exploration gives important insights into the contemporary shape of Internet regulation and the principals and knowledge bases that have given momentum to and shaped this emergent object of global governance. In particular, the paper shows how technological features of the Internet have come to function as models for the shape of its regulation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]