Abstract
This dissertation investigates the Internet governance debates of the mid 1990s, narrating events that led to the signing of the Generic Top Level Domains Memorandum of Understanding (gTLD-MoU) in May 1997. During that period, an unlikely alliance formed to create a new institutional structure that would administer the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS). The collaborators included members of the Internet technical community's "old guard," leading officials of the International Telecommunications Union, representatives of organized trademark interests, and others. Their ambitious project aimed at constituting a formal procedural apparatus capable of operating at a world-wide level, independent of the sovereign state system. Institutional membership in the new structure was intended to confer participation rights and normative obligations, thereby establishing status relationships that resonated with the kinship, ingroup, and citizenship relationships of legacy social orders.The example serves as a particularly valid and germane case study that can be used to model power relations among responsible agents in an expressly global system of rule. This postulated case allows for a more useful comparison of power relations within past, present, and future epochs.