Hans Klein

Georgia Institute of Technology | GT · School of Public Policy

Since the mid-1990s, efforts have been under way to construct an international regime for global Internet governance. Beginning with the formation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, efforts at regime construction were a main focus of the 2001–2005 UN World Summit on the Information Society. However, little progress was made...

Perhaps America's most radical telecommunication policy ever has been public access television (PA-TV). PA-TV gives ordinary citizens direct access to society's most powerful mass medium, television, and provides financial support to make that access effective (about $2 billion since its inception.). These resources have supported the creation of w...

In 1984, Congress codified public, educational, and governmental (PEG) access cable television. Perhaps the most daring of these three is public access television, which gives local residents skills, resources, and access to their local cable network. With the passage of two decades, and with hundreds of public access centers operating throughout t...

Who should control the Internet? A dozen years after the Internet became a mass medium, this issue has continued to grow in urgency, becoming white hot in fall 2005. At the September 2005 preparatory meeting for the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), a coalition of countries criticized the United States' unilateral control of the In...

Technology and Culture 44.1 (2003) 191-192 Say your name is Garfield, and you register the domain name garfield.com. Who decides whether you or the fat cat gets the site? This, basically, is the question of internet naming authority. It is also the topic of Milton Mueller's new book. Ruling the Root is both a useful work of institutional history fo...

Debates over Internet governance can be clarified by the recognition that ICANN is a regulatory agency. Its responsibilities for setting base prices, protecting trademarks, and controlling market entry are typical of a regulatory agency. Principles for good governance of regulatory agencies exist and should be applied to ICANN. These emphasize the...

Legitimacy has emerged as a major issue in debates over global governance institutions. The growth of border-crossing systems in business, ®nance, trade, communications and other areas has led to the creation of supra-national governance institutions to de®ne common rules and to perform system coordination. While most decisions made by these govern...

This study explores the computer-mediated communication (CMC) practices of the transnational civil society organizations involved in the United Nations-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Informed by international regime theory, ...

Although scholarship in the social construction of technology (SCOT) has contributed much to illuminating technological development, most work using this theoretical approach is committed to an agency-centered approach. SCOT scholars have made only limited contributions to illustrating the influence of social structures. In this article, the author...

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was created in 1998 to perform technical coordination of the Internet. ICANN also lays the foundations for governance, creating capabilities for promulgating and enforcing global regu- lations on Internet use. ICANN leverages the capabilities in the In- ternet domain name system (DNS)...

We live in interesting times! Over the past decade the internet has swept the globe to emerge as the global information infrastructure of the twenty-first century. The diffusion of the technology has been breathtaking, with millions of new hosts connecting every year and new uses emerging seemingly daily. For future historians, however, perhaps the...

Stages global elections held in 2000 by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), provide opportunities to test claims of the sceptics of global democracy, and those elections cast doubt on the strong claims of critics. Suggests that analysis shows that democracy in ICANN works well enough to merit an investment of resources...

Since the 1960s civilian technology demonstration programs in the US Departments of Transportation and Commerce have manifested a pattern in their initiation, content, and outcomes. Programs are episodic, with long periods of relative inactivity occasionally interrupted by brief periods of budgetary largesse. Program content often emphasizes inform...

Institutional analyses of federal programs to develop large technical systems explain outcomes in terms of a conflict between coalitional politics and program administration. Such analyses gain precision when they take into account how the technical system being developed mediates the conflict of politics and administration. Attention to technology...

PoliticaltheoristslikeAlexisdeTocquevillehavelongrecognized the importance of citizen associations for the practice of democ- racy. Through participation in associations, citizens both receive an education in public affairs and createcentersof political power independent of the state. Essential to participation in an associa- tionisparticipationina...

How can case studies be used as a research heuristic? If prototype case studies are performed, what can researchers expect to learn from them and how can they be structured to enhance their learning value? This paper considers that question and the learning from two case studies intended to inform multiple case studies undertaken later in the proje...

Various studies have concluded that news and public affairs programming in the U.S. exhibit biases that derive from the mass media's institutional structures. According to authors such as Ben Bagdikian, Edward Herman, and Noam Chomsky, media content is influenced by institutional factors such as the media's private ownership, its dependency on adve...

Interfirm collaboration (IFC) has been explored by organizations seeking a vehicle for the industrial modernization of small and medium-sized manufacturers. This paper offers five models of the impacts of IFC networks based on a survey of 123 case studies. The models examine the association between impacts of IFC with variables describing the origi...

The right to political participation refers to citizens' right to seek to influence public affairs. Political participation can take many forms, the most notable of which is voting in elections, but also including joining a political party, standing as a candidate in an election, joining a non-governmental advocacy group, or participating in a demo...

Special Issue edited by Hans K. Klein, Stefan Kuhlmann and Philip Shapira