Proteus online

Abstract

Scholarship on digital identity has historically reflected a Protean discourse, framing arguments in terms of fluidity and constraint. After explicating the Protean discourse that has framed critical approaches to digital identity, this article exposes how the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), in order to justify its centralized authority of the Domain Name System, itself mobilizes a Protean discourse, representing digital identity as a finite supply of water in need of proper management. From its formation in 1998 until 2009, when the US Department of Commerce effectively released the corporation from its official supervision, ICANN assembled a regime for the management of digital identity, which is itself an infrastructure for a global identity industry. By adopting an infrastructural disposition, this article situates global Internet governance in relation to the academic corpus on digital identity, interrogating the discursive conditions by which we have come to understand ourselves in relation to the Internet’s most basic addressing schema, the enclosures within which all virtual communities congregate.