Networks, Standards, and Network-and-Standard-Based Governance

Over the last half century, institutions for transnational economic governance have multiplied. Although networked governance institutions differ from each other in many ways, they share a common structure: they are organized as networks constituted around standards. Each of the scholarly literatures that has grown up around the various institutions described in this chapter has grasped some essential aspects of the network-and-standard dynamic but not others. This chapter juxtaposes the various networked governance processes and treats them explicitly as iterations of a new — or, more precisely, emergent — legal-institutional form. It also considers the relationship(s) between that institutional form and new platform entities that wield enormous de facto power — though not yet formally acknowledged governance authority—based on their control of infrastructures and protocols for networked, social communication.