What’s In a Name?

Book Review: Ruling the Root, Milton L. Mueller, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002, 301 pages. A review of Milton L. Mueller's Ruling the Root, The MIT Press, 2002. In the spring of 1998, the U.S. government told the Internet: Govern yourself. This unfocused order-a blandishment, really, expressed as an awkward "statement of policy" by the Department of Commerce, carrying no direct force of law-came about because the management of obscure but critical centralized Internet functions was at a political crossroads.

In Ruling the Root, Mueller thoroughly documents the colorful history both before and after this moment of inflection, and gives a fair appraisal both of the interests at stake and of the ways in which those interests have influenced the course of that history.