Proteus online

Abstract

Scholarship on digital identity has historically reflected a Protean discourse, framing arguments in terms of fluidity and constraint. After explicating the Protean discourse that has framed critical approaches to digital identity, this article exposes how the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), in order to justify its centralized authority of the Domain Name System, itself mobilizes a Protean discourse, representing digital identity as a finite supply of water in need of proper management. From its formation in 1998 until 2009, when the US Department of Commerce effectively released the corporation from its official supervision, ICANN assembled a regime for the management of digital identity, which is itself an infrastructure for a global identity industry. By adopting an infrastructural disposition, this article situates global Internet governance in relation to the academic corpus on digital identity, interrogating the discursive conditions by which we have come to understand ourselves in relation to the Internet’s most basic addressing schema, the enclosures within which all virtual communities congregate.

Keywords

Digital identity globalization information infrastructure Internet governance media history media industries network culture

Introduction

Communication scholars have found that through engaging digital avatars, Internet users transform their behavior not only online, but offline as well. This phenomenon is called the Proteus Effect (Yee et al., 2009). The Proteus of myth is a water god with shape-shifting powers. In Book 4 of the Georgics, Virgil tells the story of Aristaeus, an apiculturist who seizes the fluid Proteus to find out why his bees have been dying. Virgil writes:

Now Proteus, not unmindful of his art,

transforms himself into all manner of wondrous disguises:

fire, a terrifying beast, and a running stream.

But when no deceit afforded escape and he was beaten,

he returned to himself and at length

spoke with a human voice.

Aristaeus successfully controls Proteus by means of containment, forcing the metamorphic god of water to adopt a consistent and legible form. The figure of Proteus signifies not only the fluidity of identity, but also the physical constraints that subject modes of identity to management and control. The Proteus Effect suggests that life online is not separate from life in the ‘real world’, but that this dichotomy is false. The Internet offers an addition to our built environment. It offers opportunities for users to develop modes of identity within the controlled horizons of digital infrastructure.

Scholarship on digital identity has historically reflected a Protean discourse, framing arguments in terms of fluidity and constraint. In the 1990s, cyberutopians like John Perry Barlow and scholars such as Sherry Turkle suggested that digital identity is best understood as offering a potential freedom based upon disembodied metamorphoses. Barlow (1996), for example, described cyberspace as a realm ‘both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live[,]’ while Turkle (1997: 15) explicitly argued that in ‘computer mediated worlds, the self is multiple, fluid[.]’ Pushing back against this reasoning, scholars of race and gender, such as Lisa Nakamura (2002), have argued that culturally constructed boundaries in the world offline are reproduced in cyberspace, restricting user freedom within inherited categories of difference. Other scholars, including Mark Andrejevic (2009) and Lawrence Lessig (2006), have examined the enclosures of digital identity through a more materialist approach, analyzing governmental and corporate policy, law, and network design to show how individuals are subject to classification through techniques of surveillance and control.

Critical approaches to the Internet have not adequately accounted for the role global governance and standards bodies have played in shaping our understanding of digital identity. This absence becomes especially pertinent when one considers that Internet governance is historically structured around the management of names and numbers, with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) currently serving as the top-tier of a hierarchical governance regime. Most studies of ICANN and Internet governance use approaches proper to social and political science (e.g. Braman, 2004, 2009; Cerf and Crews Jr., 2003; Chango, 2011; Christou and Simpson 2008; DeNardis, 2009; Feld, 2003; Froomkin, 2000; Goldsmith and Wu, 2008; Gould, 2000; Klein, 2002; Komaitis, 2012; Mathiason, 2008; Mueller, 2002). From a humanities perspective, Tiziana Terranova (2004) and Alexander Galloway (2004) have offered some initial attempts at approaching Internet governance in a more theoretically informed manner in their Deleuzian interrogations of network culture and protocol, respectively.

After explicating the Protean discourse that has framed critical approaches to digital identity, this article exposes how ICANN, in order to justify its centralized authority of the Domain Name System (DNS), strategically mobilizes a discourse of resource scarcity, representing digital identity as a finite supply of water in need of proper management. From its formation in 1998 until 2009, when the US Department of Commerce (DOC) effectively released the corporation from its official supervision, ICANN assembled a regime for the management of digital identity, which is itself an infrastructure for a global identity industry. The emergence of this material and commercial topography situates digital identities within controlled horizons. I will argue that we must view the DNS as a complex cultural construction and evaluate it in relation to the influence ICANN policy has on the public sphere within which Internet users shape digital identities.

Protean discourse

John Perry Barlow’s ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ (1996) usefully informs the literature that has shaped our understanding of digital identity. Writing in the midst of the Internet’s commercialization and mass adoption, he describes cyberspace as a realm ‘both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live’. For Barlow, there is no matter in cyberspace, so the prescriptive concepts of ‘property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply[.]’ The denizens of cyberspace abandon their bodies to stake a claim in this ‘new home of Mind’. Barlow’s rhetorical strategy positions the virtual realm as a liberal space of freethinking and the real world as a space of bodily exploitation and control. The analytical framework exemplified by this document informs the Protean discourse that academic literature has mobilized to interrogate digital identity.

One strand of scholarship emphasizes the disembodied, metamorphic quality of digital identity, exploring self-expression, social connection, and group formation through the mediation of virtual environments. In Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle (1997) offered an early book-length study that updates a project she initiated with The Second Self (1984) to work within the context of the Internet. Turkle (1997: 10) traces ‘how a nascent culture of simulation is affecting our ideas about mind, body, self, and machine’. She situates primary research of multiuser domains within a generally defined theoretical framework of postmodernism – Jean Baudrillard’s simulation serving as a primary influence – to argue that in ‘computer mediated worlds, the self is multiple, fluid, and constituted in interaction with machine connections; it is made and transformed by language; sexual congress is an exchange of signifiers; and understanding follows from navigation and tinkering rather then analysis’ (Turkle, 1997: 15). Turkle’s study has come to serve as a frequently cited point of reference for scholars who further articulate fluid notions of digital identity and is often associated with the cyberutopianism espoused by the likes of Barlow and Howard Rheingold. More often than not, however, it seems that Turkle’s work comes under fire for not considering social, cultural, and political realities that people bring with them when they go online.

For example, scholars concerned with gender and race write against Turkle’s fluid notion of digital identity to critique how everyday experience functions to construct stereotypes in virtual environments. Lisa Nakamura (2002: xxi), for example, introduced the concept of ‘cybertypes’ to account for ‘images of racial identity engendered by this new medium [the internet]’. Nakamura (2002: 3) argues that we must view the application layer in conjunction with the ‘cultural layer’ or the ‘ideologies regarding race that [users] bring with them into cyberspace’. Nakamura’s (2002: 38) conclusions regarding identity formation on multiuser domains are explicitly at odds with those of Turkle, finding that ‘in the absence of racial description, all players are assumed to be white’. In order to have an identity online that is legible to other users, one must differentiate oneself based upon ‘markers of difference’ that govern social relations in everyday life (Nakamura, 2002: 39–40). This approach has been fruitful not only for critiques concerning the presence of racial minorities online (e.g. Kolko et al., 2000; Nakamura, 2007; Nakamura and Chow-White, 2011; Parker and Song, 2009) but also for interrogations of groups actively perpetuating racist discourse, such as virtual skinhead communities (Campbell, 2006).

Even the cyberutopian technoculture associated with Turkle and Barlow emerged from – and has been limited by – historically contingent political contexts that preceded the general spread of Internet connectivity by decades. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner (2008: 3) contextualizes the problematic ideology of cyberutopians by tracing the ‘complex intertwining of two legacies: that of the military-industrial research culture, which first appeared during World War II and flourished across the cold war era, and that of the American counterculture’. Turner (2008: 8) writes:

As they turned away from agonistic politics and toward technology, consciousness, and entrepreneurship as the principles of a new society, the communards of the 1960s developed a utopian vision that was in many ways quite congenial to the insurgent Republicans of the 1990s.

This project adds historical weight to studies by scholars who see that forms of corporate hegemony sustain what is often called Internet culture (e.g. Herman and Coombe, 2006; Hillis, 2006; Lanier, 2010; Lovink, 2003; Markoff, 2006; Porter, 1997; Turner, 2009). Critiques of such hegemony have recently been augmented by the growing phenomenon of social networking sites (e.g. Alsenoy et al., 2009; Baym, 2010; Juliano and Srinivasan, 2012; Madianou and Miller, 2013; Nabeth, 2009; Rainie and Wellman, 2012; Shirky, 2009; van Dijck 2013). The corporate underpinnings of such sites direct the implementation of standardized platforms that limit and categorize the types of avatar available to users (studies of the avatar include Agre, 1994; Baker, 2009; Boler, 2007; Buckingham, 2007; Davis, 2012; Dennen, 2009; Elias and Lemish, 2009; Vrooman, 2002).

A related body of identity scholarship common to Internet studies is what I loosely call the control society approach. Scholars working in this vein analyze governmental and corporate policy, law, and technology to show how individuals are identified in the real world as targets of surveillance and exploitation. While scholars often associate ‘the control society’ with a brief essay by Gilles Deleuze (1992), ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, James Beniger (1986) offered an earlier and more empirically grounded foundation for this corpus in his book The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Beniger situates the emerging centrality of information to the organization of societies and economies within a larger processes he call the ‘Control Revolution’. He (1986: vi) defines the ‘Control Revolution’ as ‘a complex of rapid changes in the technological and economic arrangements by which information is collected, stored, processed, and communicated, and through which formal or programmed decisions might effect societal control’. The control society approach has garnered great currency in recent years and has been attentive to the problem of identity. There was even a short-lived journal called Digital Identity, which approached identity vis-à-vis processes of identification, exemplary of the control society school (e.g. Gutwirth, 2008; Halperin and Backhouse, 2008). A recent work of legal scholarship argues that digital identity is a crucial concept that courts around the world are beginning to consider (Sullivan, 2011). The control society approach to digital identity explores how third parties use individuals through their online activity.

Just prior to the mass adoption of the Internet, Oscar Gandy (1993) published The Panoptic Sort, providing a framework for thinking about the corporate motivations and political implications of surveillance in a late capitalist information society, whether by means of digital networks or not. Gandy (1993: 15) writes:

The panoptic sort is the name I have assigned to the complex technology that involves the collection, processing, and sharing of information about individuals and groups that is generated through their daily lives as citizens, employees, and consumers and is used to coordinate and control their access to the goods and services that define life in the modern capitalist economy.

The panoptic sort ‘includes the goal of normalizing behavior within categories’ (Gandy, 1993: 24), in order to wedge consumer behavior to work within predictive models, concerned more ‘with the avoidance of loss than with the realization of gain’ (Gandy, 1993: 17). The panoptic sort functions by means of constant feedback and adjustment with the goal of abolishing risk.

With the wide adoption of digital networking, it is not a far step to situate Gandy’s panoptic sort within a Protean discourse, as Mark Andrejevic (2009) implicitly does in iSpy. Andrejevic (2009: 44) argues that what we commonly understand as interactivity is but a marketing ploy, and might better be described as ‘cybernetic participation’, wherein ‘citizens provide useful feedback in helping those who maintain control over the surveillance technology and databases to pursue predetermined ends’. This work is emblematic of a large corpus of surveillance studies that, in light of recent events such as the revelation of the US National Security Agency’s PRISM program, is sure to increase (e.g. Ball, 2009; Best, 2010; Chun, 2008; Clarke, 2008; DeNardis, 2012; Gates, 2011; Holmes, 1998; Lauer, 2012; Lorenz, 2012; Lyon, 2002, 2007; Magnet and Gates, 2009; Morozov, 2012).

Scholarship on digital identity mobilizes a Protean discourse that aligns fluidity with freedom and constraint with control. The culturally oriented approach addresses not only the potential exploration, experimentation, and development of digital identity in virtual environments but also the parameters around modes of self-identification imposed by the cultural baggage that users necessarily bring with them when they go online. This approach to digital identity deals with specific marginalized groups and ideological formations, complicating overly simplistic analytical dichotomies to show how a new medium can function as an arena within which users contest historically contingent political problems through socially situated interaction. Like much of the culturally oriented literature, the control society approach disregards the cyberutopian fantasy of disembodiment but focuses its analysis on the political economy of information rather than on notions of culture and community per se.

Protean discourse exposes cultural resources that facilitate and delimit modes of digital identity formation and, in turn, examines how third parties redefine user activity as a resource harnessed to achieve goals of profit, political gain, and the reproduction of dominant ideologies. One way to think about the point of conflict in the Proteus myth, then, is through the lens of resource management. A lack of bees, crucial to his sense of identity as an apiculturist, drove Aristaeus to go after Proteus. Resource scarcity, whether real or imagined, presents a discursive arena within which conflicting dynamics of identity and society come into contact. In seizing Proteus, Aristaeus discovers the reason for the bee blight while achieving mastery of water. Aristaeus assuages anxieties concerning a threat to his identity, recuperating the necessity of his position in society.

Below, I offer an historical overview of ICANN and its regulation of the DNS, emphasizing how this institution represents its powers of governance through a Protean discourse of resource management that mirrors critical engagements with digital identity. A consideration of global Internet governance in relation to this corpus promises a deeper understanding of the discursive conditions by which we have come to understand ourselves in relation to basic organizational schemas of Internet infrastructure, the enclosures within which all virtual communities congregate. This analysis denaturalizes the DNS, a system of categorization constituted by the hierarchical regime of name servers and administrators who function as disciplinary actors in charge of digital enclosures, informing how global Internet governance influences the material conditions of digital identity.

The emergence of a ‘trickle-down’ identity industry

In 1998, ICANN was incorporated in Los Angeles under the auspices of the US DOC as a global authority in charge of coordinating the Internet’s primary identity management system, the DNS. While formally a nonprofit corporation, ICANN manages the distribution of Internet protocol (IP) addresses and has global authority over domain name retailers who sell these digital identifiers as a form of intellectual property. This industry blurs the line between personal identity and intellectual property by enforcing privately authorized access to a public sphere. ICANN sees itself as a ‘global community supporting the vision of “one world, one internet”’. Like the more publicized World Trade Organization or International Monetary Fund, ICANN ‘crosses the public-private divide with hybrid arrangements’ involving ‘global regulation through institutions that combine public, business and/or civil society elements’ (Scholte, 2011: 12). While it has so far flown under the radar of popular scrutiny, the role ICANN plays in our daily life cannot be overemphasized (e.g. Struve and Wagner, 2002). As one scholar writes:

To appreciate the critical importance of ICANN, one might consider that this institution has the managerial and technical capability to shut down, or severely limit access to, all websites ending in the suffix “.org” or the Internet domain of a whole country. (Chango, 2011: 267)

ICANN justifies its centralized authority based on the scarcity of IP addresses. There are only about 4.3 billion IP addresses available in IP version 4 (IPv4), the version of IP that has been historically dominant. IP requires that every computer in the network has a unique numerical address, so that information makes it to the proper destination. In computing, the word protocol ‘refer[s] specifically to standards governing the implementation of specific technologies’ (Galloway, 2004: 7). The Internet uses a protocol suite consisting of transmission control protocol (TCP) and IP, which has remained the standard since 1984. It operates by means of packet switching. Lawrence Lessig (2006: 43) offers a nice summary of this technique: ‘Brutally simplified, the system takes a bunch of data (a file, for example), chops it up into packets, and slaps on the address to which the packet is to be sent and the address from which it is sent’. In other words, packet switching disassembles the information sent from one machine into little parts, marking each part with the IP address of the machine sending the information, as well as with the IP address of the machine receiving the packets, where the system reassembles the parts into the intended whole.

The attribution of information to a particular identity is necessary for the proper functioning of the Internet. As Hans Klein (2002: 195) writes, ‘The Internet really consists of two “systems,” one for communications (the “TCP/IP” protocols) and one for addressing (the DNS)’. While domain names are ‘alphanumeric (and hence human-friendly) identifiers of computers on the Internet[,] IP (Internet protocol) numbers (or addresses) are machine-friendly numeric identifiers’ (Klein, 2002: 195). This is similar to the traditional postal service, wherein every individual with a residence or occupation has a home or business address. The difference between the postal system and the Internet, however, is that whereas the address pool for the postal service is potentially infinite, the address pool for the Internet is finite.

Following the commercialization of the Internet in the mid-1990s, it became clear that IP addresses were becoming a scarce and therefore valuable commodity. In 1993, the DOC privatized regulation of the IP address pool. An American company called Network Solutions, Inc. (NSI) sold IP addresses for a profit, mostly to American financial interests. The for-profit status of NSI proved controversial, to say the least. Harold Feld (2003: 341) writes:

As a private company working under an explicit contracting arrangement with the federal government, Network Solutions made policy based on its perception of its own best interest and negotiations with the other party to the contract, the National Science Foundation.

After NSI received permission in 1993 to charge a yearly US$50 fee for the registration and continued maintenance of a domain name, with the National Science Foundation (NSF) collecting US$15 per payment for ‘an intellectual infrastructure fund’, the corporation earned upward of US$50 million by 1998, when a federal judge declared ‘it an unconstitutional tax’ (Mueller, 2002: 67). By this time, however, the cat was out of the bag, as the mid-1990s .com boom ‘created a multi-million dollar revenue stream that attracted the interest of other private businesses’ (Mueller, 2002: 67). Verisign acquired NSI in 1998, entering into negotiations with the newly minted ICANN, and by 1999 was awarded custody of the .com, .net, and .org top-level domains (Mueller, 2002: 195), sources of immense revenue streams.

In order to justify the privatization of the name space, ICANN suggested that the proper functioning of the Internet relied on the equitable allocation of IP addresses through a centralized authority, mobilizing a Protean discourse evocative of global water regulation. The political climate supported such a strategy, as regulatory bodies began to deal with the global water crisis through privatization. In her article ‘International Environmental Law, Water, and the Future’, Hilal Elver (2006: 893) writes:

In late 1990s, the international financial institutions gave governments an idea about how to deal with emerging water interests and with the financial burdens associated with infrastructural needs. The formula was simple: ‘private sector participation in water supply and sanitation’.

Elver argues that the fraught relationship between global law and the allocation of water concerns fundamental questions proper to human rights, resource scarcity, and neoliberal privatization of formerly governmental responsibilities. Likewise, a fundamental issue of Internet governance concerns how IP addresses should be allocated between various states, which are all part of the network of networks. This is analogous to what Elver (2006: 890) notes as ‘two broad issues’ fundamental to water law:

how should uses of water that affect quality and quantity in a transboundary lake or river be allocated between the two or more states belonging to the basin? And what procedural rights and responsibilities pertain to states sharing a basin?

In net terms, how should IP addresses be assigned to machines in various sovereign nations, who will distribute and manage these addresses, and what rights and responsibilities pertain to all parties involved? For its part, ICANN promises a more equitable allocation of digital identity by espousing a market-oriented approach.

In fact, ICANN represents its regime as a veritable rainfall (Figure 1). A visual representation of Protean discourse, this diagram naturalizes the status quo of the Internet governance hierarchy by portraying it as, quite literally, the product of natural weather patterns and gravity. By selecting rainfall to represent its regime, ICANN portrays the allocation of IP addresses not simply as a form of resource management but also, paradoxically, as an unregulated and spontaneously occurring condensation of constituents. The water analogy would contain different shades of meaning if it was represented as a hydropower plant, a manmade dam, or a water tower.

Figure 1.

The neoliberal, ‘trickle-down’ structure of the ICANN regime. ICANN: Internet Corporation for Assigned Named and Numbers. Source: Beginner’s Guide to IP Addresses, reproduced with permission from the ICANN publication.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), a primary mandate of ICANN, is the biggest raindrop at the top of the hierarchy. Beneath it are continentally divided regional Internet registries (RIRs), and further down are Internet service providers, schools, telecom companies, and so on. ICANN represents itself as nourishing a trickle-down economy that waters the world equally. This is far from true, for a closer look at the RIRs reveals an inequitable topography of IP address allocation.

Before delving into a more detailed analysis of these entities, I will explicitly articulate my theoretical framework and its relation to my object of study, showing how my critique of Protean discourse can help us understand ICANN and global Internet governance. Because I began this article on Internet governance with quote from Virgil, it seems fitting enough to include Georges Bataille’s (1985: 31) version of the Proteus myth, his take on a dictionary entry for the word ‘Formless’, which is also the title of this brief work from 1929:

A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.

As an Internet scholar, the insight I gain from this reading is that when we talk about identity as fluid, we do not really mean that it is, or even can be, formless. What we mean is that an individual can identify and be identified in multiple, often contradictory ways.

Even though an individual can experience multiple identification, few (if any) experience real formlessness. This is especially true for digital identity, as it is digital, after all. Put differently, even though identities shift, they generally shift from something to something else, never in a state of pure fluidity or formlessness. Even though all individuals are always changing, an identity is an identity, at least in terms of mathematical logic. Someone can have multiple identities, shift multiple identities multiple times a day, or even be in transition from one identity to the next; even still, in the context of everyday life, an individual’s identity is generally so overdetermined as to render any of these caveats beside the point.

Norbert Wiener had something like this in mind when he invoked a Protean discourse in the tellingly titled The Human Use of Human Beings from 1950, a book intended to explain cybernetics in laymen’s terms. Wiener (1954: 96) writes, ‘We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves’. For Wiener, we are not simply water, undefined in all its fluidity; we are, rather, a whirlpool of water, a unique system within a system, a naturally occurring cybernetic structure. While his take on Protean discourse might at first seem disconcerting (if we’re not fluid, are we not free?), it need not be. Each one of us is a pattern within the pattern, which means that we constitute the greater system. In relation to ICANN and the Internet governance industry, we are not merely governed; every IP address works to constitute not only ICANN, but the Internet at large.

RIRs are domain name and IP address administrators a level below ICANN, functioning as wholesalers of digital identity (Klein, 2004: 196). Before the creation of ICANN, domain names and IP addresses were allocated under the supervision of Jon Postel at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI) in coordination with Network Solutions. As the Internet became increasingly available worldwide in the early 1990s, it became apparent that international technical support was required to facilitate the exponentially increasing demand for spots in the DNS. In 1992, the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE-NCC) was established in Amsterdam to oversee IP address allocation for Europe and the Middle East. In 1993, the Asia-Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC) was founded in Brisbane to cover Australia as well as South and East Asia. During this time, the NSF took control of the IANA mandate from USC-ISI, seeking to form an organization in the United States akin to those in Europe and the Asia-Pacific. Feld (2003: 339) writes:

In 1997, just as the Department of Commerce became active in DNS policy, the NSF and Network Solutions facilitated the creation of a third RIR, ARIN [the American Registry for Internet Numbers], to administer IP address allocation for North, South, and Central America, and Africa.

With ICANN’s formation in 1998, these three coordinating bodies were brought in under a centralized authority and categorized as RIRs. Even though RIPE-NCC and APNIC were not necessarily eager to submit to ICANN’s regime,¹ they had little bargaining power due to Verisign’s control of the root infrastructure and the universal IP address pool that constitutes it. With the acquisition of NSI by Verisign, ICANN entered into negotiations with the newly restructured corporation in 1998 (Feld, 2003: 341–342). In 1999, ‘Verisign consented to contract with ICANN and acknowledge its authority’ (Feld, 2003: 353). As Feld (2003: 353) writes, ‘In the contract, Verisign secured for itself a guarantee that ICANN could not impose new regulations on Verisign unless ICANN could document that the new regulations resulted from a documentable “consensus” within the Internet community’. The DOC required of Verisign the acceptance of a memorandum of understanding, which entrusted custody of the root infrastructure to Verisign (Feld, 2003: 337), including the all-powerful .com top-level domain.

In order to coordinate its regime along already established geographical boundaries, ICANN facilitated the establishment of the Latin American and Caribbean IP Address Regional Registry (LACNIC) in 1999, which oversees IP address allocation for Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. With the founding of the African Network Information Center (AfriNIC) in 2004, ICANN now functions as a supervisory authority of five RIRs, each responsible for a singular continental or cultural territory (Figure 2).²

Figure 2.

The regional Internet registries. Source: Beginner’s Guide to IP Addresses, reproduced with permission from ICANN.

Like ICANN, each RIR is a private organization, ‘focusing on technical coordination and charging fees designed to cover the costs of administering the IP address system’ (Feld, 2003: 339). ICANN distributes blocks of IP addresses to each RIR. Taking IPv4 as an example, each RIR receives what are called /8 blocks, or 16,777,216 contiguous addresses (ICANNa: 7). RIRs can request additional blocks when they provide documentation demonstrating that they have only one half of a block left. The initial awarding of the number of blocks an RIR receives is based on the following calculation: ‘Necessary Space = Average Number of Addresses Allocated Monthly during the Past 6 Months × Length of Period in Months’ (ICANNa: 8). In this way, ICANN distributes IP addresses through a self-described ‘hierarchical system’, whereupon the ‘RIRs then allocate smaller IP address blocks to ISPs [internet service providers] and other network operators’ (ICANNa: 8). As the ICANN-authored Beginner’s Guide to Internet Protocol Addresses (8) goes on to say, ‘From there, the ISPs and other Internet operators assign the addresses to the individual Internet connections you are probably accustomed to’. ICANN goes to great lengths on their website to imply that they provide a service indispensable to the personal development of Internet users,³ downplaying the contingent relationship between their governing hierarchy and user identity.

ICANN elicited from Verisign a concession that guaranteed its centralized authority and proved crucial to the emergence of a global identity industry. As part of its contract to operate the root infrastructure ‘in accordance with the directions of the Commerce Department’, Verisign ‘agreed to accept domain name registrations only from ICANN-accredited registrars’ (Mueller, 2002: 196). As Mueller argues (2002: 196), this aspect of the deal locked ICANN’s ‘new regime into place’.

Registrars are domain name and IP address retailers, private companies that operate on a competitive basis after they have received accreditation from ICANN.⁴ According to the 2009 Registrar Accreditation Agreement,⁵ registrars are required to pay ICANN fees of both fixed and variable rates. The agreement states that registrars must pay:

variable accreditation fees established by the ICANN Board of Directors, in conformity with ICANN’s bylaws and articles of incorporation, provided that in each case such fees are reasonably allocated among all registrars that contract with ICANN and that any such fees must be expressly approved by registrars accounting, in the aggregate, for payment of two-thirds of all registrar-level fees.

On top of these charges, registrars must also pay a fixed fee of US$4000 per year.

Within a vast list of responsibilities, each registrar must assume to maintain its accreditation, it is important to note certain functions concerning identity management. According to ICANN’s Beginner’s Guide to Domain Names (ICANNb: 7), if you are the one registering a domain name, ‘you must provide your registrar with accurate and reliable contact details’ including ‘your full name, a valid postal address, email address, voice telephone number and fax number (if available)’, and also ‘promptly correct and update these details when necessary’. ICANN’s policies concerning identity management directly affect Internet users who access a registered site. As per Article 3.2 of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement, registrars are obliged to provide their RIR with the following: (1) The name of the registered name being registered; (2) The IP addresses of the primary nameserver and secondary nameserver(s) for the registered name; (3) The corresponding names of those nameservers; and (4) Any other data the registry operator requires be submitted to it. Since IP requires that each packet of information is marked with the sender’s and receiver’s identification, the policy requiring the disclosure of primary and secondary nameservers reins individual users’ activity within the purview of the regime.

While it might seem that ICANN’s dispersal of registrars to operate under the immediate supervision of their relatively local RIRs points to a democratic impetus, this view is specious. Far from facilitating the local development of Internet users across the globe, the vast portion of revenue generated by the registrars flows through North America, the United States in particular. The Internet’s Network Information Center (InterNIC) maintains the authoritative list of all accredited registrars in every RIR. The data gathered by InterNIC reveals an inequitable topography of registrars (Table 1). As of November 2012, there were 1127 accredited registrars in the world. AfriNIC supervises a grand total of six registrars, two of which are located in South Africa. LACNIC oversees a similarly small proportion, with 18 registrars in the region, Brazil hosting 7. APNIC serves a more respectable 110 registrars, with 38 in China, 19 in India, and 18 in South Korea. RIPE-NCC hosts 175, with 23 in Germany, 20 in the United Kingdom, and 16 in Australia. And then there is American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), which oversees 818 registrars. Within ARIN, Canada hosts 117, more than the total number in the entire Asia-Pacific region. The United States houses 693 registrars, more than twice the total amount of AfriNIC, LACNIC, APNIC, and RIPE-NCC combined.

Table 1.

The inequitable topography of registrars.

1. AfriNIC: Registrar total – 6	4. RIPE-NCC: Registrar total – 175
Burundi – 1	Australia – 16
Ghana – 1	Austria – 5
Morocco – 1	Belgium – 3
Senegal – 1	Czech Republic – 1
South Africa – 2	Denmark – 4
2. LACNIC: Registrar total – 18	Finland – 1
Argentina – 3	France – 17
Brazil – 7	Germany – 23
Colombia – 1	Gibraltar – 1
Costa Rica – 1	Hungary – 2
Honduras – 1	Ireland – 1
Mexico – 3	Israel – 4
Panama – 2	Italy – 9
3. APNIC: Registrar total – 110	Jordan – 1
China – 38	Kuwait – 1
Hong Kong – 4	Latvia – 1
India – 19	Liechtenstein – 1
Indonesia – 2	Lithuania – 2
Japan – 15	Luxembourg – 1
South Korea – 18	Monaco – 1
Malaysia – 2	The Netherlands – 10
New Zealand – 3	Antilles (the Netherlands) – 1
Pakistan – 1	Norway – 2
Philippines – 2	Poland – 3
Singapore – 1	Portugal – 1
Taiwan – 1	Russian Federation – 6
Thailand – 1	Spain – 13
Viet Nam – 3	Sweden – 9
	Switzerland – 3
	Turkey – 8
	Ukraine – 2
	United Arab Emirates – 2
	United Kingdom – 20
	5. ARIN: Registrar total – 818
	Anguilla – 1
	Bahamas – 2
	Barbados – 1
	Canada – 117
	Cayman Islands – 4
	United States – 693

Note: AfriNIC: African Network Information Center; LACNIC: Latin American and Caribbean IP Address Regional Registry; APNIC: Asia-Pacific Network Information Center; RIPE-NCC: Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre; ARIN: American Registry for Internet Numbers.

Since ICANN distributes IP address blocks to RIRs based upon how many addresses have been and are projected to be allocated, the Internet name space is largely controlled by ARIN. Most revenue associated with the allocation of digital identity circulates through US-based registrars. The stated mission of the DOC is to promote ‘job creation, economic growth, sustainable development and improved standards of living for all Americans’ (Mission Statement). The DOC ended its partnership with ICANN in 2009, having helped establish an information infrastructure that ‘touches the daily lives of the American people in many ways’ through ‘trade, economic development, technology entrepreneurship and business development’. The emergence of a US-dominated identity industry is in accord with the DOC mission, despite its detriment to the rest of the world.

The inequitable allocation of digital identity is symptomatic of complex social inequalities that constitute the digital divide. Protean discourse, then, offers itself as a potentially fruitful tactic to argue for the expansion of Internet infrastructure into neglected regions of the world. Just as the UN General Assembly has acknowledged access to water as a human right, access to a digital identity might be considered a human right as well. This is not completely without precedent. In her recent book Digital Identity: An Emergent Legal Concept, Clare Sullivan (2011: 14) cites the right to identity ‘found in the Convention on the Rights of the Child’, as well as the European Court of Human Rights, which ‘has stated that a right to identity that applies to adults and children is protected under Article 8 of the ECHR’. Sullivan (2011: 71) argues that ‘the right to identity arises in specific form in relation to digital identity’. Since Proteus is always subject to constraints imposed by the environment, the precise limits such constraints impose influence his being in the world.

A manufactured scarcity

The state of IP address scarcity is not as ICANN suggests. This is because there are actually two protocols operating on the global Internet: IPv4, the original internetworking protocol that most of us use on a daily basis, as well as IP version 6 (IPv6). IPv6 became operational in 1998, coinciding with the incorporation of ICANN, to offer an effectively infinite address pool, supposedly solving the problem of scarcity associated with IPv4.

The name space, then, is contingent upon two universal pools of IP addresses, IPv4 and IPv6, which ICANN actively represents in terms of global water scarcity (Figure 3). The pool of IP addresses most commonly allocated since the early 1980s is based upon IPv4. An IPv4 address consists of a 32-bit binary number. The various unique combinations of a 32-bit number yield a total pool of about 4.3 billion addresses (ICANNa: 2). Given the exponential expansion of Internet use beginning in the mid-1990s, fears concerning a scarcity of IP addresses urged technical groups such as the Internet Engineering Task Force to begin developing a new protocol with a much larger address space. The experimental IPv5 provided some important concepts, although not an ultimate solution.

Figure 3.

The IP address pool as a finite supply of water. IP: internet protocol. Source: Beginner’s Guide to IP Addresses, reproduced with permission from ICANN.

In 1998, coinciding with the incorporation of ICANN, engineers announced the completion of IPv6 (DeNardis, 2009: 97), an operational protocol offering an address space vastly larger than IPv4. IPv6 uses a 128-bit address number, which yields 340 undecillion unique addresses (ICANNa: 5). ICANN likes to emphasize the immensity of this new address space. Their Beginner’s Guide to Internet Protocol Addresses (5) notes that ‘while the Earth’s orbit around the Sun is only big enough to contain 3,262 Earths put side by side, it would take 21,587,961,064,546 Earths to use all the addresses in the part of the IPv6 space we now use’.

ICANN and the DOC, however, successfully structured its digital identity regime to ensure US influence over nearly 75% of the name space. Funneling IPv6 into the inequitable topography of registrars results in a manufactured scarcity. According to the formula that determines the allocation of IP addresses, even the infinite supply of IPv6 is subject to an Internet governance industry based upon the logic of scarcity, effectively reproducing US influence over the global name space.

The US economic stake in the name space is exponentially augmented by the fact that each protocol is mutually exclusive. In other words, if I want to contact you via the Internet, and I am sending data from a machine with an IPv4 address (and, therefore, sending the information based upon the standards of v4’s specific protocol), I will be able to contact you only if you also have an IPv4 address and operate by its respective protocol. If you are running IPv6, we will not be able to communicate. In a manner of speaking, IPv4 and IPv6 constitute separate Internets. The phenomenon of mutually exclusive protocols has important consequences for the geopolitical complexities of Internet governance as well as the economics of the corresponding digital identity industry.

An important aspect of the Internet governance industry concerns the fact that there are still a lot of IPv4 addresses available for allocation to users. Because the DOC played such a decisive role in the creation of an inequitable topography of registrars, US interests own an inordinate proportion of IPv4 addresses. In a bid to wrestle some power away from ICANN’s ARIN-centric regime, ‘Beginning in 2000, governments in China, Japan, the European Union, Korea, and India viewed IPv6 as a national priority and inaugurated policies to rapidly drive deployment’ (DeNardis, 2009: 97). Laura DeNardis (2009: 97) notes that during this time, the United States, ‘with a dominant Internet industry and ample addresses, remained relatively disinterested in IPv6’. DeNardis (2009: 97) goes on to describe how many ‘warned that US inaction on IPv6 threatened American competitiveness and jobs relative to countries like China and India with aggressive IPv6 strategies’.

The opposite has proven to be true. Milton Mueller et al. (2012) of the Internet Governance Project recently released a report demonstrating how the introduction of IPv6 has surprisingly led to an increased demand for IPv4 addresses, which has revitalized what was thought in the late 1990s to be a dying market. This, too, is due to the mutually exclusive operation of protocols. Mueller et al. (2012: 2–3) emphasize that ‘the IPv6 protocol was not made backwards compatible with IPv4[,]’ and go on to elucidate the significance of this:

The lack of compatibility means that to implement IPv6, one must either abandon communication with everyone else running IPv4, or run both protocols at the same time. And running both protocols in parallel (known as ‘dual stacking’) does not actually reduce the demand for IPv4 numbers. So the migration from IPv4 to IPv6 does not involve an incremental reduction in the demand for IPv4 numbers as networks adopt IPv6. Rather, it involves parallel growth of the IPv4 and IPv6 Internets until such time as a huge tipping point is reached, when almost everyone is running IPv6.

Regions that urged the early adoption of IPv6 have been compelled to operate IPv4 simultaneously to stay competitive in the US-dominated digital identity industry.

In fact, US interests are served both economically and in terms of ‘national security’, as much of the world outside ARIN has foreclosed the advantages of greater anonymity through its adoption of IPv6. DeNardis (2009: 97) writes that the United States remained largely disinterested in IPv6 ‘until the Department of Defense [DOD], in 2003, endorsed the protocol as a potential apparatus in the post-September 11 war on terrorism’. The DOD’s endorsement of IPv6 is due to the fact that the protocol, unlike IPv4, ‘marks each packet with an encryption “key” that cannot be altered or forged, thus securely identifying the packet’s origin[,]’ and this makes ‘it nearly impossible for people to remain anonymous on the Internet’ (Helms quoted in Lessig, 2006: 54). The geopolitical climate has in part built two digital environments within which Internet users dwell, IPv4 and IPv6, each one with its own codes of conduct.

Technological affordances set physical parameters that delimit the type of legality attributed to life online. The Internet was not born in a vacuum, but itself embodies historically specific values and knowledge practices. Such knowledge practices become apparent in comparing IPv4 and IPv6, as each protocol is able to constrain Proteus in specific ways. The Internet itself, as well as the protocols that regulate life online, is a material realization of cultural paradigms that influence how we conceive geopolitical relations. Sally Engle Merry (2006) has pointed out the crucial role knowledge practices play in the shaping of international law. Merry (2006: 108) writes, ‘The knowledge practices of law, including its technologies for producing truth and defining identity, often sit at the intersection of plural legalities’. Merry (2006: 108) argues that technology functions to ‘produce particular forms of organizing information shaped by legal rules’. Technology is, and always has been, a site at which various conceptions of identity both cooperate and struggle with each other.

Legal scholars have been prone to debate Internet regulation in terms of a Protean discourse based upon whether or not the constraints of cyberspace are qualitatively different from realspace. Jack Goldsmith (1998), for example, argues that existing legal frameworks can effectively govern the global Internet and that cyberspace operates in a manner identical to realspace. Goldsmith (1998: 1234) writes that legal disputes in cyberspace:

are no more complex or challenging than similar issues presented by increasingly prevalent real-space events such as airplane crashes, mass torts, multistate insurance coverage, or multinational commercial transactions, all of which form the bread and butter of modern conflict of laws.

For Goldsmith, the Internet is subject to, rather than an architect of, global law.

From the other side of the spectrum, David Post (2002) takes Goldsmith on directly, arguing that even in realspace, laws treat different environments differently. He thinks that realspace and cyberspace relate to each other in a manner similar to the land and the sea. We regard the land and the sea as similar in some instances and dissimilar in others, depending upon the question at hand. Post (2002: 1373) writes:

For the purpose of answering some questions (e.g., about the mechanics of genetic recombination in mammals, energy transmission within food webs, or the relative advantages of sexual and asexual reproduction) we ignore the differences between the two environments and lump terrestrial and oceanic organisms together. For the purpose of answering other questions (e.g., about social communication within animal populations, the mechanics of oxygen transport, or the design of the mammalian forelimb) we must distinguish between terrestrial and oceanic organisms, because for these purposes the two environments are very different indeed.

For Post (2002: 1372–1374), cyberspace is a unique environment because it affords a very low cost of production, a very high speed and breadth of distribution, and it depends on ‘bits rather than atoms[.]’ He concludes that there should be unique laws for a fluid cyberspace, just as there are unique laws of the sea.

The infrastructural disposition

While protocol in and of itself might operate ‘outside institutional, governmental, and corporate power’, as argued by Alexander Galloway (2004: 122), Internet users do operate within such frameworks. As such, studies of digital identity must consider how infrastructure facilitates enforced hierarchies of discipline that categorize stakeholders making up our digital environment. Lisa Parks (2015) advocates adopting ‘an infrastructural disposition’ when thinking about media and society. This term becomes particularly evocative in the context of digital identity, referring not only to a research method, but also to the very subject of research, the infrastructural disposition of individual users and groups. In this sense, disposition means both attitudes and inclinations, as well as arrangements, or how Internet infrastructure has disposed people within and in relation to its material environment.

This framework is indebted to literature representing the infrastructural turn in media studies. I am particularly inspired by the work of Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker, who show how an ethnographic approach (Star, 1999) can reveal much concerning the historical connections between culture and information infrastructures (Bowker, 1997). In their jointly authored book Sorting Things Out, Bowker and Star (2000) extend our understanding of infrastructure to include discursive strategies that categorize the material components of our built environment. They show that infrastructure is both material and abstract, as physical reality and discursive practices are mutually constitutive. Protean discourse, then, does not merely offer a theoretical framework for understanding processes of subject formation, for it partly constitutes the ontological status of Internet infrastructure. Protean discourse plays an active role in building and governing the material conditions of digital identity.

Some literature on information infrastructures has considered the problem of identity explicitly. Work in the field of human–computer interaction is exemplary of this. For example, Lucy Suchman (2006) applied anthropological techniques to show how human agency, technological systems, and social and cultural forces interact in dynamic ways that should be considered in systems design. Janet Murray (2011) has more recently taken up this goal, delineating a means by which to impose methods of humanist study as a strategy of computer and network design. Paul Dourish (2001) has argued that popular understandings of human–computer interaction have reproduced a logic that effectively mirrors Cartesian dualism, whereby the mind/body distinction has been replaced by human/machine. He applies a phenomenological approach to components of digital infrastructure, suggesting a more holistic understanding of embodied interactivity.

Literature across disciplines has taken communication via information networks as the subject of analysis, offering different views of how certain infrastructural frameworks affect our notions of identity. Manuel Castells (1996, 2000, 2010) offers a thorough discussion of networked identity through an approach informed by sociology and political science. He begins his three-volume opus with a simple proposal: ‘Our societies are increasingly structured around a bipolar opposition between the Net and the Self’ (1996: 3). He develops a notion of identity as a form of citizenship struggling with the rise of networked group formation, all the while influenced by the continued power of states. Castells argues that this social conflict supports the increasing prevalence of identity politics.

Others have offered more implicit critiques of how information networks affect notions of identity. Yochai Benkler (2007), for example, sees the networked individual as a potential target for new types of markets, a mode of identification that relates not only to the consumerism of the commercial Internet but also to the so-called subversive practices such as peer-to-peer file sharing. Susan Crawford (2013) has recently offered another economic and policy inclined discussion of networked identity. She argues that Internet users, who rely on corrupt service providers for their connection, are effectively prisoners of corporate power and influence, situating users as passive spectators. Adopting a different perspective, Barbara van Schewick (2012) identifies users as potential innovators subject to boundaries set by Internet architecture.

Often, scholars situate the limits and potentials of human action in relation to networked connectivity more than in relation to digital information. The effect of this approach confines many analyses to the Internet’s application and link layers, the most visible layers, the layer of social networks and massively multiplayer online games, on the one hand, and the layer of broadband and wireless access, on the other. The core transport and Internet layers are often taken for granted. While studies point out that IP addresses connect us and affix information to us, more often than not, they stop short of interrogating the contingent nature of Internet architecture and protocol, namely that IP addresses are historically produced, imbued with social, cultural, and institutional values. The core layers of Internet infrastructure remain largely invisible, with the consequence that the production of identity through the organization of binary digits, a culturally influenced component of protocol that undergirds all Internet use, has remained unexamined.

In adopting an infrastructural disposition, digital identity refers to binary digits that we classify in historically contingent ways and to how such classification influences our conceptions of identity. Simply put, digital identity concerns numbers and names. Core IPs depend on unique numerical addresses, binary code legible to machines. Names, understood more broadly as labels or signs, are the linguistic categories that usher code into discursive practices legible to humans. An infrastructural study of digital identity requires analyzing how numbers in the core layers of the Internet are subsumed by names and historicizing how these names are harnessed into discourse that renders a dominant mode of human classification all but invisible.

This model of digital identity provides a framework to critique not only our relationship with the Internet, but also, and more importantly, our relationship with each other as mediated by the Internet. The Internet governance industry partly structures the development of digital identity by mobilizing a Protean discourse that contributes to the construction and regulation of Internet infrastructure, a discourse through which we understand notions of fluid freedom and material constraint. I understand freedom as a measure of individual autonomy, as the horizon of choice in practice rather than in perception. We all are tied to material artifacts. Our societies are bound by information infrastructures. Freedom is always a matter of measurement, for we are as limited as the built environments within which we dwell.

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