Governing the Electronic Commons: Globalization, Legitimacy, Autonomy, and the Internet

The Internet is one of history’s great transformative technologies, paralleling and perhaps even eclipsing the impact of radio and TV (see Gorman 2009). No discussion of globalization can ignore the impact of information and communications technology (ICT) as a pre-eminent driver, and the Internet is one of the most important components of these ICTs. If modern globalization is distinguished by simultaneity (eg, much of the world watching the Beijing Olympics at the same time) and decentralized coordination (eg, global value chains), it depends almost completely on the computerized codification of information and computerized communications. Here again, the Internet is a key feature. Understanding economic globalization in terms of international currency flows, global outsourcing, or 24/7 global production also relies on the ubiquity of ICTs and the Internet. Even a more culturally oriented definition of globalization as the sledgehammer of the present or the past, of rooted identities in the face of modernity and cosmopolitanism (Archibugi and Held 1995) assumes that a key force is a new communications technology that shatters the barriers of culture and mind.