Review: Declaring Independence in Cyberspace by Milton Mueller
Reclaiming Internet Governance from the Gravitational Pull of the State
In an era when even our most thoughtful allies and scholars have begun to suggest that the global Internet might have been a mistake—that perhaps connectivity is dangerous, that AI is too risky, that copyright and digital sovereignty are necessary correctives—it is both a relief and a provocation to read Declaring Independence in Cyber Space.
Across academic and policy circles, there’s a growing resignation: maybe permissionless innovation should be reined in. Maybe information should be bordered. Maybe the Internet should be nationalized to “protect” people (some sovereignty-wash this authoritarian notion). Perhaps most alarmingly, these arguments are increasingly made by those trained to see technology through legal, social science, and political economy lenses. Instead, many are now looking backward, lamenting past choices and seeking remedy through slow, often ineffective multilateralism and by defending and promoting sovereignty and reclaiming it. At times, they sound indistinguishable from the authoritarian regimes they once opposed—advocating disconnection as salvation.
Mueller’s book pushes back, forcefully and thoughtfully. It offers a compelling defense of non-state, multistakeholder governance and a timely critique of the creeping assumption that states must fix everything from Internet infrastructure to artificial intelligence. In doing so, Declaring Independence in Cyberspace also challenges the data-driven orthodoxy dominating Internet and social media scholarship: what Mueller memorably describes as “blindly spitting out quantitative analytics of textual artifacts.” This mode of scholarship often becomes a justification for demanding more access to people’s data, losing sight of normative commitments to rights, autonomy, and global connectivity.
Reading Mueller, I see my own commitments reflected clearly: a globalist, liberal-democratic approach to communications policy. One that defends permissionless innovation, fights to keep information and services unbounded by geography, and resists the overreach of copyright maximalists and cultural protectionists. I share his hope that our community, those committed to openness, interoperability, and generativity, will grow, not shrink, in the face of AI and its governance dilemmas. Ideally, Internet infrastructure and values will shape AI governance.
Importantly, this book is more than a retelling of the IANA transition. It’s a political history, written in accessible language, that explains how the Internet came to be governed by global institutions rather than sovereign states and what’s at risk when that independence is eroded. Mueller highlights how, before the mid-90s commercialization of the Internet, IANA was managed informally by the technical community. There was no federal contract. But in order to globalize IANA, the U.S. government first had to nationalize it. This paradox captures the tension at the heart of Internet governance: how to construct globally legitimate systems outside the strict confines of state authority.
Mueller also reminds us that the U.S., in the early Internet era, chose not to regulate prematurely. That restraint—allowing norms to emerge globally—was essential. Had the U.S. imposed domestic rules in the 1990s, we would have ended up with an American Internet, not a global one. As one of my favorite contributors, Becky Burr, in the book recalls:
“There was a desire to have a global conversation about how to deal with governance of the Internet that would deal with its implications for the global economy. It wasn’t about projecting American legal systems, but about understanding how you could create global systems.”
Yet even without direct control, the U.S. continued to exert influence—on issues from WHOIS privacy to the .XXX delegation. The eventual IANA transition in 2015 was not ceremonial; it was the culmination of years of pressure from the Internet community.
Mueller illustrates how the corporation consolidated power within its Board while paradoxically claiming that its own community was too fragmented to hold it accountable.
The issues Mueller traces such as governance of infrastructure, power concentration, accountability, and institutional independence are not unique to ICANN. They are surfacing across all areas of digital governance: privacy, access to data, disclosure of sensitive personal information, law enforcement access to data and mitigation of abuse, intellectual property overreach, sanctions, and barriers to knowledge and global Internet resources. Mueller’s account helps us see how these challenges can play out and be contested within a multistakeholder framework. His analysis is not merely historical; it is prescient, providing lessons for how we might govern AI, platforms, and future global technologies without defaulting to sovereignty-based logics.
At the same time, Declaring Independence raises uncomfortable questions about the direction of current digital governance debates, especially in Europe. While the EU often frames its initiatives as value-driven and rights-protective, its increasingly inward-looking regulatory posture betrays a different ambition: shaping global tech governance through regulatory unilateralism, without engaging in the hard work of building inclusive global norms. The EU’s push for a “European stack” may stop short of explicitly calling for a “European Internet,” but it reflects a worldview that prioritizes regional sovereignty over interoperability and shared rulemaking. In the AI space, we see similar patterns: the EU advances detailed, top-down governance frameworks that are designed for global reach, but not global deliberation. Rather than working through multistakeholder or multilateral institutions, the assumption seems to be that Brussels can regulate the world by setting a high bar and letting market incentives do the rest. Mueller’s book reminds us that such sovereignty-based approaches not only fragment the Internet—they also risk exporting legal regimes built on national or regional values to a digital ecosystem that demands something more open, negotiated, and truly global.
Another eye-opening assertion by Mueller is that what truly matters is not multistakeholder governance per se, but the existence of governance models that operate independently of states, particularly private or community-based governance. Multistakeholder approaches can take many forms, but when they are state-sanctioned or state-led, the inclusion of stakeholders becomes conditional: governments can choose to incorporate their input—or ignore it entirely. Mueller’s point is well taken, though it could be challenged in cases where states delegate real decision-making authority to stakeholders. Still, his argument serves as a useful provocation: perhaps the paradoxical path toward genuine multistakeholder and non-state governance begins with some form of nationalization, followed by deliberate divestment or institutionalization outside government control. The Digital Services Act (DSA), for example, gestures toward civil society inclusion, but ultimately falls short of embedding civil society meaningfully in governance structures. What remains is a state-driven regulatory framework, not a truly distributed or participatory model.
Mueller also revisits Barlow’s famous and often misinterpreted “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” clarifying that it was not a call for an ungoverned Internet, but for self-governance: an attempt to build structures outside state control, not outside any control at all.
This, ultimately, is the core lesson:
The most salient feature of the Internet governance regime is its independence from established governments—not just its embrace of multistakeholderism.
Sovereignty-based governance cannot accommodate global, pluralistic participation. It reduces stakeholders to nation-state silos, assumes uniformity of interest within each “unit,” and excludes individuals and transnational communities. If Internet registries had been governed by states, we would not today be discussing multistakeholder Internet governance at all.
As we enter a new cycle of anxiety over AI, platform power, and geopolitical fragmentation, Mueller’s book reminds us not to abandon the foundational choices that made a global Internet possible. Declaring Independence is a necessary intervention—a defense of institutional experimentation, technical community authority, and governance beyond the state.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262552585/declaring-independence-in-cyberspace/
