Esther Dyson played a key role in building Internet governance as the first chair of ICANN, and made a pioneering contribution to online civil liberties with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She is chairman of Edventure Holdings, which publishes the influential industry newsletter Release 1.0. Among her books is Release 2.1: A Design for Living in the Digital Age.

Recent articles

The leading ICANN activist Esther Dyson reflects on the domain name organisation’s recent dispute over the future direction of Internet governance.

In Issue 3 of openDemocracy, we published an interview with Esther Dyson on governing the Internet. She described how ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) was created - and called for global parties to keep it open and accountable. Our members had the opportunity to put their questions to her in our debate section. Just back from a meeting of the At-Large Study Committee of ICANN, she responds to six of them, dealing with issues of both process and principle. She finishes by examining notions of global democracy.

The net is rule-governed space as well as dynamic technology and business medium. But who wrote the rules? An ICANN pioneer tells openDemocracy the story of how the net community harnessed political imagination to create its own forms of governance, and asks: can a global civil society now emerge, with political parties to help make that governance accountable?