Milton Mueller on Wikileaks

The Wikileaks controversy is part of a bigger, ongoing battle between the transnational publics linked by the Internet and government by traditional, territorial nation-states.
 
Whatever one's opinion about the wisdom and ethical justification of the Wikileaks revelations, it has shown that there is a new force in the world that national governments and their diplomats don't know how to control yet. The U.S. government's attempt to suppress or block the Wikileaks’ cables not only has failed; it has made the U.S. look a lot more like China and other governments hostile to the Internet.
 
That problem is the theme of Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance. The book explains how the contradiction between networks and states shows up in a number of areas, ranging from copyright protection to content regulation to the global management of Internet addresses and domain names. Wikileaks is only the latest and most sensational example.
 
In a widely-circulated blog post, I relate the Wikileaks controversy to the broader issue of global Internet governance.