Regional Community and Regional Governance in the Infosphere: Exploring the .asia Initiative

  • McDowell S
  • Steinberg P
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Abstract

The collapsing of time and space in international trade, investment, and financial flows, and in international communication, are presented as almost immutable forces arising from globalization and the introduction and use of digital media technologies. Despite claims of a placeless flow of information and communication in the infosphere, the ongoing importance of place is evident in the construction of the infosphere and the experience of living in the infosphere. In a fundamental sense, this involves moving across space and transgressing the boundaries of place, as well as within spaces created in part through governance, technology deployment, and representations. Our research extends the co-authors work in Stephen D. McDowell, Phillip E. Steinberg, and Tami K. Tomasello, Managing the Infosphere: Governance, Technology, and Cultural Practice in Motion, published by Temple University Press in 2007. This advances a spatial constructivist approach to conceptualize the tensions in governance, technology, and culture that underlie efforts to promote and structure mobility and/or fixity in internet governance. The interaction between cultural practices and understandings, the development and use of new information and communication technologies, and the processes of economic globalization and governance have all attracted significant attention in the last decade, and have also set the context for efforts to promote internet based applications and to govern and guide their use. The interaction of culture, technology, and governance are exhibited in the tensions faced more broadly in the governance of the internet and the infosphere, including ongoing efforts by states, regional bodies, and international organizations, as well as providers and users of goods and services. These actors attempt to negotiate the tensions between national production vs. international trade, capital fixity vs. mobility, creating and shaping national territory vs. external, non-territory, and political vs. economic considerations. One example of these tensions can be seen in internet governance in the development of generic top level domains, purporting a friction free global space of communication, and country code domain names that represent and create a sense of the national. Current work explores an effort to simultaneously facilitate and promote connectivity and exchange while also attempting to build regional spaces. Specifically we consider the development and implications of the .asia generic top level domain (www.dotasia.org). This naming convention creates a regional gTLD name, a level above the country code top level domain. It also creates new intermediate category between the national and the global, in an attempt to reflect and create a regional community: DotAsia is a not-for-profit, community-based organisation incorporated in Hong Kong. Asia has developed into a global force in the international commercial, political and cultural network. The .ASIA domain aspires to embrace this dynamism in the Asia Century to become a nucleus, intersection and breeding ground for Internet activity and development in the region. The mission of the DotAsia Organisation is: To sponsor, establish and operate a regional Internet namespace with global recognition and regional significance, dedicated to the needs of the Pan-Asia and Asia Pacific Internet community. To reinvest surpluses in socio-technological advancement initiatives relevant to the Pan- Asia and Asia Pacific Internet community; and To operate a viable not-for-profit initiative that is a technically advanced, world-class TLD registry for the Pan-Asia and Asia Pacific community. . While current gTLDs tend to focus on a vertical group (e.g. commercial entities, network providers, organisations , etc.) within the global Internet, .Asia will embrace a horizontal perspective with a clear brand to reach and enrich the broad global community. Unlike ccTLDs, which provide for a local audience, .Asia will allow the user to express membership in the larger Asian community (www.dotasia.org). The exploration of this initiative will be set in the broader context of the efforts to create regional governance and institutions, as well as to build regional identity and community. Could the formation of a "region" on the net precede more substantive regional cooperation? Where does "Asia" as a community stand, as opposed to either the countries that constitute it or other continents and communities. Reworking a ccTLD to a bigger scale suggests the qualitative status of a gTLD, but does locating the region at a different scale constitute a qualitative change in the meaning of a gTLD?

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McDowell, S. D., & Steinberg, P. E. (2008). Regional Community and Regional Governance in the Infosphere: Exploring the .asia Initiative. In 1st International Giganet Workshop.

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