The Self-Governing Internet: Coordination by Design

How the Internet's technical design and cultural understandings serve as the system that automates 99% of Internet coordination; what the 1% of exceptional issues are in today's Internet, and where the stresses lie in the current structure are discussed.

Abstract

Introduction If the Internet were an organization, how would we describe its management? To answer this question, we first distinguish two extremes of management style: centralized and decentralized. In the centralized extreme, managers make their presence essential to most day-to-day functioning. Without their involvement, little information would be exchanged and few decisions would be made. Managers have lots of power, but they can never take a vacation. In contrast, in the decentralized organization, managers create systems that allow their organizations to run without them most of the time. All routine events, constituting 99 percent of organizational life, are handled by members of the organization empowered by the system. The manager's roles are to set up the initial system, to integrate new activities into it as they emerge, and to deal with the one percent of truly exceptional events. Contrary to its popular portrayal as total anarchy, the Internet is actually managed