To access the full paper, download the PDF on the left-hand sidebar.
Twenty years ago, only a million computers were connected to the Internet, while today, perhaps as many as 2 billion people on the planet enjoy its use. What was once primarily a tool for scholarly communications has quickly become the key infrastructure for communicating at a distance. At the core of this growth is the remarkable scalability of Internet Protocol (IP). Whether YouTube videos and Twitter microblog posts or telephone calls and sensitive military communications, IP is the technological backbone of digital connectivity on planet Earth.
IP grants a standard for data communication that scales to almost every computing device on the planet. Because of this technology, and some exceptions notwithstanding, the last twenty years have been a period in which a message can be transmitted from one computer to another anywhere, in large part because the set of instructions for delivery have been open, understandable, and relatively easy to implement. The economic transformation ushered in by this connectivity is well underway, but its salient issues regarding politics, and more for the purposes of this paper, international politics, are still emerging. This is a newly constructed techno-informational space, often called “cyber” because there is something that clearly goes beyond just the delivery and receipt of data by IP.
