10/03/2018 - Ostrom Memorial Lecture - Milton Mueller: “Sovereignty and Cyberspace: Institutions and Internet Governance”

Cyberspace is one of the most critical resource domains in contemporary society. The principle of state sovereignty is one of the most important concepts underpinning the world’s governance institutions. This lecture will examine the relationship between the two. Based on an analysis of the techno-economic features of the domain, it questions the desirability and practicality of sovereignty in cyberspace, and explores the applicability of global commons models to cyberspace. While I will show that self-governance by a transnational Internet community is both possible and in many respects already exists, the military significance of the cyber domain and the mounting tensions between national authority over information and communications and the globalized capabilities of the Internet means that governance in cyberspace must take state power into account. But does this mean we are doomed to revert to the territorially fragmented governance of a sovereignty-based model? Or can some way be found to reconcile the two?