For a discipline that turns on understanding power dynamics, it is surprising how little scholarship has emerged from international relations that seeks to explore how the Internet intersects with existing theoretical positions. Daniel McCarthy’s book is a major contribution to this broader project that we’ve seen slowly and unsteadily emerging.

At the forefront of these attempts to incorporate digital technologies into global politics are scholars who work with concepts and methods developed in Science and Technology Studies (STS). McCarthy combines Marxist historical materialism with concepts from the Philosophy of Technology to explore and explain the way that US foreign policy has fundamentally shaped Internet technology. In the space available here, I will focus on the empirical contribution of the book but stress that McCarthy’s conceptual contribution in the early chapters is substantive and for those with an interest in STS, this is recommended reading.

McCarthy necessarily avoids the complex debates about US foreign policy through the Bush and Obama administrations. Instead, he regards it through the broad lens of the ‘Open Door’ tradition defined by the ‘twin aims of opening markets to international capital and opening polities to conform to liberal democratic principles’. McCarthy argues that the pursuit of these interests has ensured that Internet technology is ‘biased’ towards the free flow of information and that this has an important power dimension to it. While avoiding making normative claims about the value of Internet freedom himself, he points out that this situates actors on one side or the other (or perhaps along a spectrum of compliance) of this powerful norm. To resist it not only requires additional resources (filtering, etc.) but also has a legitimacy cost as Internet freedom has now been linked to a human rights agenda. The US is, therefore, able to cast itself as ‘moving with the tide of history’ rather than intentionally shaping the future in such a way as to further institutionalise its own power.

McCarthy then turns to the great problem of intellectual property rights and the Internet. ‘US discourse endorses a picture of market-based, incentivised innovation as the only workable method of technological development – in contrast to state-led or non-proprietary developmental alternatives.’ This, McCarthy points out, ignores the fact that the Internet itself was developed outside a commercial framework. He also usefully debunks the myth of the meritocracy that produces ‘start-ups’ by pointing to the substantial capital investment in applications such as Google and Facebook. This story that ‘good ideas rise to the top’ has recently been rebuffed by the President of Estonia who argued that it is extremely difficult to retain indigenous talent in the face of US venture capital. Essentially, good ideas can rise to the top – as long as they do so in the US, another power dimension with implications for international relations.

This book is a substantive contribution to a worryingly under-researched area. How technological change is impacting on and being shaped by international relations is not only deeply significant for understanding the environment we find ourselves now in, it will be intensely important for anticipating the future. The sooner we see more careful, intelligent work like this, the better.

Daniel R. McCarthy, Power, Information Technology, and International Relations Theory: The Power and Politics of US Foreign Policy and the Internet, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Reviewed by Dr Madeline Carr, Senior Lecturer in International Politics and the Cyber Dimension, Aberystwyth University.