To Sign or Not to Sign. Hegemony, Global Internet Governance, and the International Telecommunication Regulations

This article uses the issue area of global internet governance to investigate US hegemony in the face of a rising hegemonic challenger, China. The paper
exploits the controversies around the revised International Telecommunication Regulations at the 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications in order to examine the preferences of individual states with regard to the internet’s basic principles and whether these were influenced from the outside. A quantitative analysis shows that domestic political structures that substantively clash with US liberalism, together with the unequal spread of ICT across the globe, best explain the adoption of the new regulations. There is only minimal evidence of hegemonic influence; security and trade relations were not found to influence state positions. However, aid from the US pushed autocracies toward alignment with these power’s preferences. No such effect was found for democracies.