Milton L Mueller

Milton Mueller is an internationally prominent scholar specializing in the political economy of information and communication. The author of seven books and scores of journal articles, his work informs not only public policy but also science and technology studies, law, economics, communications, and international studies. His books Will the Internet Fragment? (Polity, 2017), Networks and States: The global politics of Internet governance (MIT Press, 2010) and Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace (MIT Press, 2002) are acclaimed scholarly accounts of the global governance regime emerging around the Internet. Mueller’s research employs the theoretical tools of institutional economics, STS and political economy, as well as historical, qualitative and quantitative methods.

Dr. Mueller’s prominence in scholarship is matched by his prominence in policy practice. He is the co-founder and director of the Internet Governance Project (IGP), a policy analysis center for global Internet governance. Since its founding in 2004, IGP has played a prominent role in shaping global Internet policies and institutions such as ICANN and the Internet Governance Forum. He has participated in proceedings and policy development activities of ICANN, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and regulatory proceedings in the European Commission, China, Hong Kong and New Zealand. He has served as an expert witness in prominent legal cases related to domain names and telecommunication policy. He was elected to the Advisory Committee of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) from 2013-2016, and appointed in 2014 to the IANA Stewardship Coordination Group. Dr. Mueller has also been a practical institution-builder in the scholarly world, where he led the creation of the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet), an international association of scholars.
 

Projects:

• The Internet Governance Project
  Founded in 2004, the Internet Governance Project (IGP) has grown to be a leading source of analysis of global Internet policy and Internet resource management that is widely read by governments, industry and civil society organizations. IGP both researches and analyzes global Internet policy issues on our blog and in our publications. We hold an annual conference and support graduate students and facilitate engagement by undergraduates.
   
• WebPKI and Nongovernmental Governance of Trust on the Internet
  WebPKI is the transnational critical infrastructure you've never heard of. This project explores the way private sector governance mechanisms interact with PKI technology to produce trust and security on the global Internet. It will examine the intersection of private sector and governmental policy, including the vetting of national Certificate Authorities and the problem of nation-states not trusting each other. The research will also assess the economic sustainability of global PKI governance. It will focus in particular on the short- and long-term effects of Let’s Encrypt, a successful free certificate provider, and the ways changing CA market shares, competition among browsers and OS platforms, and other techno-economic trends affect the cooperative governance structure of WebPKI.