What Last Week’s Anti-US Shift in Internet Governance Means to You

A Q&A with Milton Mueller, a professor of Information Studies at Syracuse University.

The heads of ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium and the Internet Society, backed by the heads of the regional registrars for global top-level domains, issued a statement calling for the “acceleration of the globalization” of the functions carried out by The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). In the arcane world of Internet administration and governance, this was seen as something of an important shift away from the US-centric bent the Internet has had since its inception, and in time it may be seen as a turning point toward a more global governing framework. But there’s no question the transition is going to be sticky. So could all this mean for the US?