[...] Almost a century and a half ago, at the birth of the electric sublime, competing telegraph interests established the International Telecommunication Union, a global body made up mainly of government organizations and managed on a one-nation, one-vote basis to set global standards for the new technology. [...]

However, as the number of nations grew, including former colonial societies eager to create standards that would help them expand widespread access to communication technology (and not just the profits of communication companies), conflict grew at the ITU. As a result, core industrial powers, led by the United States, began to consider alternatives. These included, first, political bodies, like Intelsat, a global communication satellite organization whose rules permitted Western control and more recently, private corporations, such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which helps to establish technical standards for the web. [...]

[...] the number of global interests is expanding so that even something as seemingly innocuous as setting a country code for a web address becomes a political question when, to cite one particularly fractious case, it is Palestine petitioning for "p.s"(Clausing 19999). Should ".union" join ".com" on the list of acceptable suffixes, as one public-interest group proposed? Private businesses expect to depoliticize these issues by setting up Western controlled private or only quasi-public standards organizations. But they are actually only displacing tensions and contradictions.

In 2002 ICANN ultimately succeeded in eliminating democratically elected members of its board, but even this neo-liberal stroke does not guarantee smooth functioning (Jesdanum 2002). [...]

[...] the dominant political tendency today is neo-liberalism, which was founded on the retreat of the state from vital areas of social life, including communication, where the state was once very significantly involved in building infrastructure, establishing technical standards, regulating market access, and providing services. According to neo-liberalism, such functions are best provided by the private sector with minimal state involvement. Specifically, neo-liberalism aims to customize state functions, tailor them to suit business needs, and thereby avoid what its supporters contend is the stalemate created by excessive public demands for state services.

[...] Nortel's product also reflects a fundamental contradiction besetting the business of cyberspace, i.e., the conflict between he goals of building consumer confidence to turn the Internet and its users into a universal market and commodifying without government intervention whatever moves over the Internet, including personal identity [...]