Open Networks and the Open Door: American Foreign Policy and the Narration of the Internet1

Abstract

This article explains the US foreign policy discourse surrounding human rights, democracy and the Internet as the pursuit of ''technological closure'' for the network. US policymakers draw upon international norms and values to construct a symbolically powerful argument regarding the valid material composition of the Internet. Through these arguments, the US creates a narrative that casts its vision for the Internet as moral, just and progressive. In contrast, opponents of the American vision of the Internet are cast as backward states impeding the flow of history. In the process, the contested nature of the technology and its contingent nature are sidelined, naturalizing and reifying its historically and culturally specific evolution, to the benefit of American foreign policy aims. I will outline the politics of identity construction, and the meaning attached to the technological structure of the Internet, as central to the ongoing contestation over its form. Finally, I will note how the narrative created by US foreign policymakers legitimizes their material practice of supporting anticensorship technologies.

Reimagining Internet Geographies: A User-Centric Ethnological Mapping of the World Wide Web

“…The preceding discussion on the relations between the web use of local societies and the political economies governing these societies also provides a timely critique of the dominant “Internet freedom” rhetoric, which in effect adds to the entitlement of multinational Internet companies that demand free operation both in the US and abroad without government intervention (Cramer, ). In fact, media policy scholars suggest that U.S. foreign policies serve the interests of large corporations by equating the goal of “liberalizing foreign polities with the values of human rights and democracy” to that of “opening [foreign] markets to US capital,” (McCarthy, , p. 89; also see Nordenstreng, ; Schiller & Sandvig, 2011). This one‐dimensional conception of Internet freedom as the absence of political intervention explains why U.S. policy‐making and popular media discourses have little recognition of the role of active government interventions, particularly in numerous developing states, in providing Internet access and local content.…”

US Leadership in Cyberspace: Transnational Cyber Security and Global Governance

“…From the view of US policymakers, the social purpose of the Internet in the post-Cold War era is to serve as a platform for expanding free-market commerce and free speech, for globally expanding information and economic exchange (Kiggins 2011). To ensure the Internet is used in accordance with this social purpose, US policymakers have constructed a discourse around the Internet founded on the principle of openness (Antonova 2008;McCarthy 2011). US policymakers discursively promote and protect the Internet as an open domain in order to create global institutional conditions that are favorable for global expansion of information and economic exchange consistent with the worldview of US policymakers.…”

Open for Expansion: US Policy and the Purpose for the Internet in the Post-Cold War Era

“…It is the root zone database file that TCP/IP references when resolving a request by an Internet user to access a desired Web site. How the domain name system and root zone database file are governed imputes a normative purpose to the Internet and provides certainty to users of cyberspace in the form of operability, property rights protections, and technical consistency (Mueller , ; Mathiason , ; Antonova ; McCarthy ). North () has demonstrated that institutions provide certainty to market participants contributing to efficient market function, and this was of primary concern to US policymakers contemplating the purpose for the Internet just after the close of the Cold War…”

“…US policymakers have consistently chosen world power pursuing “expansion abroad in a way that reflected particular American interests and values” (Bacevich :25; also see Nau ; Layne ; Williams [1959] ). Williams ([1959] 1972) recognized that US policymakers reframed the expansionary objective of US policy into the notion of “openness,” and it is this reframing that McCarthy () so clearly illuminates in US Internet governance policy. US policymakers promote openness—a general reduction of barriers to trade, capital flows, and exchange of political ideas—as the international economic order sine qua non .…”

“…Where prior work points to US national interest as being reflected in US Internet governance policy without thoroughly detailing content or context of US national interest, this article supports that claim by providing that content and context. In addition, this article gestures toward work that argues US policymakers discursively project neoliberal values of openness and expansion into governance of the Internet in an effort to protect the medium against alternative Internet governance structures that would obstruct the US purpose for the Internet (see Antonova ; McCarthy ). Advancing our understanding of US Internet governance policy by grounding its origins in the National Export Strategy of the Clinton administration will demonstrate that US policymakers advocate an open Internet for the purpose of expanding American products and political ideals.…”