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"Internet Governance" published on by Oxford University Press.

This paper assesses the relationship between public participation and accountability in ICANN. It shows that ICANN tries to combine three distict organizational models as a result of its global governance responsibilities: it combines elements of a private corporation, a bottom-up standards body and a government regulatory agency. The paper shows that the private corporation model has come to dominate the other two; however, ICANN lacks the normal forms of accountability to which private corporations are subject. ICANN has responded to accountability concerns by creating new opportunities for public comment, review, and participation. This paper questions whether participation is an adequate substitute for accountability. It analyzes three distinct reforms in ICANN's history to show how participation can displace accountability rather than improve it.

In a comment on Don Lavoie's "Political and Economic Illusions of Socialism" (see abstract in this section), it is argued that Lavoie shares with V. I. Lenin the view that economic order determines social & political freedom. While Lenin wanted to collapse economic activity in the state, Lavoie wants to collapse all politics in the market, in what is called the "political illusion of libertarianism." Lavoie's articulation of a libertarian concept of politics, as free public discourse about the rights & responsibilities of independent social entities, is marred by the expectation that a system of rights can be determined once & for all. In a Reply, Lavoie (George Mason U, Fairfax, Va) argues that "politics as discourse" is an unattained ideal & agrees that libertarians need to avoid economism. However, the symmetry noted between Lenin's position & that of the libertarians is misleading: the libertarians are not reducing social diversity to a narrow perspective but are insisting that political activity be subject to the same standards as economic activity. A. Waters

A review essay on books by: Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in the Age of High Technology (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1986) & Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977); Stephen F. Goldberg & Charles R. Strain (Eds), Technological Change and the Transformation of America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U Press, 1987); & Joel Colton & Stuart Bruchey (Eds), Technology, the Economy and Society: The American Experience (New York: Columbia U Press, 1987 [see listings in IRPS No. 51]). The issue of technology is critical to social theory because it cannot be raised without stumbling into the paradox of whether artifacts or the people who produce them control social relations. Winner's thesis that technology is autonomous advances dialogue on the subject by making the paradox explicit & laying bare the conceptual confusion that leads into it. He argues that technological systems have inherently political qualities, & advocates the establishment of conscious control over the process of technological evolution. Winner's arguments could also be applied to any product of human culture, with language as the most obvious example. It is argued that humans are inherently incapable of exerting the kind of control over the process of cultural evolution that Winner seems to want. Both Technological Change and the Transformation of America & Technology, the Economy and Society sound the same note as Winner's books; the authors of these essays fall into two categories: technology assessors, who propose the rational assessment of the effects of technological innovation on the total environment; & communitarians, who emphasize that the assessment & adoption of technology must flow from a set of common values. Liberalism is viewed as the real target of the philosophical attack on technology; it is argued that critics of liberalism sense that a freely developing technology is their enemy because it permits cooperation among people whose values, religions, or beliefs are so different that cooperation on any other terms would lead to irreconcilable conflict. F. S. J. Ledgister