Political Economy

Government information systems are big business (costing over 1% of GDP a year). They are critical to all aspects of public policy and governmental operations. Governments spend billions on them — for instance, the United Kingdom alone commits £14 billion a year to public sector information technology (IT) operations. Yet governments do not generally develop or run their own systems, instead relying on private sector computer services providers to run large, long-run contracts to provide IT. Some of the biggest companies in the world (IBM, EDS, Lockheed Martin, etc.) have made this a core market. This book shows how governments in some countries (the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands) have maintained much more effective policies than others (in the United Kingdom, Japan, and Australia). It shows how public managers need to retain and develop their own IT expertise and to carefully maintain well-contested markets if they are to deliver value for money in their dealings with the very powerful global IT industry. This book describes how a critical aspect of the modern state is managed, or in some cases mismanaged.

This book provides an exposition of key issues in the development, steering, and management of the Internet. Much of its focus is on the governance of the infrastructure for Internet communication, particularly data transmission protocols, protocol addresses, and corresponding domain names. It also maps the development and application of core principles of network design for the Internet. A recurrent theme of the book is the challenges associated with establishing global, multi-stakeholder governance structures based on bottom-up, consensus-seeking decisional procedures, without direct foundation in a treaty framework. The book's basic argument is that the success of the Internet is largely due to its development within open and democratic cultures, and that Internet governance structures ought accordingly to continue to cultivate such cultures.