Note: to request the complete paper, which is still under construction, send a note to Dr. Mueller at mueller@syr.edu

The paper sets out a conceptual model of how technological change leads to institutional innovation and applies it to the case of the Internet. Technology creates new forms of value. Institutional innovation occurs when two types of property rights problems arise during the process of appropriation. First, firms and other agents are faced with substantial uncertainties about which organizations have authority to establish, recognize, or enforce property rights in the new resource. Second, the emergence of the new resource creates an opportunity to execute major shifts in the distribution of transaction costs.

The model is applied to a history of Internet governance. The narrative traces the emergence of the root of the Internet domain name system as a global resource; the property rights conflicts that emerged over domain names, trademarks, and the registration business; and the emergence of new international institutions, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and a new system of global dispute resolution.

JEL classifications: O33, O34, O38, L33, P16