AMERICANIZATION ONLINE? TECHNOLOGICAL VALUES IN GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

Within the technology-values debate, this thesis demonstrates how conscious decisions and choices concerning a particular technological artifact affect political outcomes. In this thesis, the unit of analysis will be the technology of the Internet. This document will illustrate how two values – pluralism and individualism – became reflected in this technology as a result of decisions taking place along the technology’s innovation. These two values underlie American society and, in the context of the Internet’s technology, they lose a degree of subjective interpretation often occurring in the physical world improving the purity of their expression. With the creation of the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) these two technological values have reached a new global frontier finding their articulation in the principles of the governance body and in the regimes that formed around the technology. The prominence of these values is attributed to the technology’s early epistemic community that had successfully translated its agenda into technological values based upon their occupation of the decision-making sphere regarding the technology. i