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VOLUME 116

JANUARY 2003

NUMBER 3

ARTICLES

HABERMAS@DISCOURSE.NET:

TOWARD A CRITICAL THEORY OF CYBERSPACE

A. Michael Froomkin

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I NTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................... 751

I. H ABERMAS ON D ISCOURSE T HEORY ...................................................................................... 757

A. Critical Theory ..................................................................................................................... 761

B. Substantive Criteria ............................................................................................................ 764

C. Discourse Ethics and Practical Discourses ...................................................................... 767

II. T HE I NTERNET S TANDARDS P ROCESS : A D ISCOURSE A BOUT D ISCOURSE ..................... 777

A. What Is the Internet? .......................................................................................................... 778

B. A Short Social and Institutional History of Internet Standard-Making ...................... 782

1. The Prehistoric Period: 1968–1972 ............................................................................... 783

2. Formalization Begins: 1972–1986 ................................................................................. 785

3. IETF Formed, Further Formalization: 1986–1992..................................................... 786

4. Institutionalization and Legitimation: 1992–1995 ...................................................... 787

(a) The Internet Architecture Board (IAB)................................................................. 788

(b) The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) ...................................................... 792

5. The Internet Standard Creation Process Today (1996-Present) ................................ 794

III. T HE I NTERNET S TANDARDS P ROCESS AS A C ASE S TUDY IN D ISCOURSE E THICS ......... 796

A. The IETF Standards Process as the Best Practical Discourse....................................... 798

B. Counter: The IETF Standards Process Is Too Male and Monolingual To Be the

“Best” Practical Discourse .................................................................................................. 805

C. Counter: It’s Too Specialized To Matter ............................................................................ 808

1. The Claim that the IETF Is “Technical” and Thus Outside the “Public Sphere” .. 808

2. The IETF Debates Whether an RFC Is “Law” .......................................................... 812

D. Can the IETF Example Be Generalized?.......................................................................... 815

IV. A PPLICATIONS : C RITIQUES OF I NTERNET S TANDARDS F ORMED

O UTSIDE THE IETF................................................................................................................. 818

A. Noninstitutional Standard-Making.................................................................................. 819

B. Socialization and the Reproduction of Non-Hierarchy .................................................. 820

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C. Delegation: The Usenet Example ....................................................................................... 821

1. Mass Revenge/Vigilante Justice: The Usenet Spam Problem and Its (Partial)

Solution ............................................................................................................................ 825

2. The Usenet Death Penalty ............................................................................................ 829

D. Responses to Email Spam................................................................................................... 831

E. Market-Induced Standardization ...................................................................................... 835

F. ICANN: The Creation of a New Governance Institution................................................. 838

1. Why ICANN Matters..................................................................................................... 842

2. ICANN’s Legitimation Crisis....................................................................................... 844

3. Learning from ICANN .................................................................................................. 852

V. T ECHNOLOGIES FOR D EMOCRACY ......................................................................................... 855

A. Hardware for Democracy.................................................................................................... 858

B. Weblogs and Blogs................................................................................................................ 859

C. Wiki Webs and Other Collaborative Drafting Tools ......................................................... 880

D. Slash and Other Collaborative Filtering Tools ................................................................. 863

E. From Open Government to Community Deliberation Tools............................................ 867

VI. C ONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................... 871

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HABERMAS@DISCOURSE.NET:

TOWARD A CRITICAL THEORY OF CYBERSPACE

A. Michael Froomkin ∗

I NTRODUCTION

In what has been called “a monumental achievement . . . that pro-

vides a systematic account of major issues in contemporary jurispru-

dence, constitutional theory, political and social philosophy, and the

theory of democracy,” 1 Jürgen Habermas has proposed a discourse eth-

ics as the basis for testing the legitimacy of legal institutions. Haber-

mas seeks to identify and explain a method for justifying valid law

and legal institutions, or at least the procedures necessary to make le-

gitimate law. His approach blends an abstract theory of justice with a

sociological theory of law that is grounded in empirical observations. 2

Attempting to bring moral philosophy into the realm of political sci-

ence, Habermas seeks nothing less than to describe a system that can

validate moral choices, notably those about how society should be or-

ganized. Habermas proposes a way to identify norms that are pre-

sumptively legitimate because they were reached according to morally

justified procedures. In so doing, Habermas directly confronts the

most difficult obstacles to moralizing about social organization, includ-

ing the fact/value distinction, 3 false consciousness, 4 and the injustices

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∗ Professor of Law, University of Miami School of Law. This paper had a long gestation for a

piece concerning the Internet, during which I accumulated debts to an unusually large number of

helpful readers, more than I dare list here. Previous drafts also benefited from discourse at the

Georgetown University Law Center (2001), a Stanford Law School faculty colloquium (2000), the

conference on Culture & the Humanities (Winston-Salem, 1999), and — under another title — the

17th IVR World Congress: Challenges to Law at the End of the 20th Century (Bologna, 1995) and

the Law and Society Association Annual Meeting (Toronto, 1995). Caroline Bradley has had to

put up with it from the start, and for that and everything else, no thanks suffice.

1 Michel Rosenfeld, Law as Discourse: Bridging the Gap Between Democracy and Rights , 108

H ARV . L. R EV . 1163, 1164 (1995) (reviewing J ÜRGEN H ABERMAS , B ETWEEN F ACTS AND

N ORMS : C ONTRIBUTIONS TO A D ISCOURSE T HEORY OF L AW AND D EMOCRACY (William

Rehg trans., 1995) [hereinafter B ETWEEN F ACTS AND N ORMS ]).

2 See id.

3 See, e.g. , J ÜRGEN H ABERMAS , M ORAL C ONSCIOUSNESS AND C OMMUNICATIVE

A CTION 176–77 (Christian Lenhardt & Shierry Weber Nicholsen trans., 1990) [hereinafter

M ORAL C ONSCIOUSNESS ].

4 False consciousness is the “holding of beliefs that are contrary to one’s personal or group

interest and which thereby contribute to the maintenance of the disadvantaged position of the self

or the group.” John T. Jost & Mahzarin R. Banaji, The Role of Stereotyping in System-

Justification and the Production of False Consciousness , 33 B RIT . J. S OC . P SYCHOL . 1, 3 (1994).

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and imbalances caused by unequal distributions of power and knowl-

edge. The outcome of this inquiry is of enormous relevance to the con-

struction and legitimacy of the legal system, 5 especially because

Habermas argues that only a social system that guarantees basic civil

rights and enables meaningful participation by all those affected by a

decision can make legitimate decisions.

In the spirit of Habermas’s project of linking sociological observa-

tion with legal philosophy, 6 this Article offers an analysis of the Inter-

net standards processes — complex nongovernmental international

rulemaking discourses. This Article suggests that one of these dis-

courses is a concrete example of a rulemaking process that meets

Habermas’s notoriously demanding procedural conditions for a dis-

course capable of legitimating its outcomes. This unusual discourse is

conducted by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which uses

it to set the basic technical standards that define Internet functions.

Identifying a practical discourse 7 that meets Habermas’s conditions

does not by itself prove the truth of Habermas’s procedural theory of

justice. Rather, it removes the potentially crushing empirical objection

that the theory is too demanding for real-life application. If Haber-

mas’s account of procedural legitimation is right, it should be capable

of application. Conversely, if it were impossible to conduct a deci-

sionmaking process in the manner that Habermas argues is necessary

to legitimate outcomes, then his theory of justice would be, at the very

least, incomplete. 8

Standards discourses are but a tiny fraction of the conversations

enabled by the Internet. This Article does not suggest that discourse

on the Internet as a whole meets Habermas’s condition for the genera-

tion of legitimate rules, limiting its claim to only a much smaller,

slightly more formalized, set of cooperative procedures that make the

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5 B ETWEEN F ACTS AND N ORMS , supra note 1, at xl–xli.

6 See, e.g. , id. at 288.

7 A practical discourse is a discourse about norms relating to practical things, such as “the

questions of the good life.” See id. at 60; see also T HOMAS M C C ARTHY , T HE C RITICAL

T HEORY OF J ÜRGEN H ABERMAS 312–14 (1978). The term is meant to contrast with “theoreti-

cal discourse,” which is discourse about truth claims of an idealized nature, derived from reason.

See id . at 291–310 (explaining Habermas’s view of “theoretical discourse”). “Practical discourse

may be understood as a communicative process that induces all participants simultaneously to

engage in ideal role taking in virtue of its form, that is, solely on the basis of unavoidable univer-

sal presuppositions of argumentation.” ÜRGEN H ABERMAS , J USTIFICATION AND

A PPLICATION : R EMARKS ON D ISCOURSE E THICS 50 (Ciaran Cronin trans., 1993) [hereinafter

J USTIFICATION ]. As explained below, participants in a practical discourse bring to it certain

commitments including an honest desire to tell the truth and to be understood. See infra pp. 771–

73.

8 Cf. I MMANUEL K ANT , On the Common Saying: “This May Be True in Theory, but It Does

Not Apply in Practice” , in K ANT ’ S P OLITICAL W RITINGS 61, 61 (Hans Reiss ed., H.B. Nisbet

trans., 1971) (concluding that if a theory does not work in practice, it shows a need for more the-

ory).

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CRITICAL THEORY OF CYBERSPACE

753

other Internet discourses possible. 9 Still, even one documented exam-

ple of discourse ethics in action may disarm the oft-heard criticism

that the Habermasian project cannot be achieved in practice. 10

Habermas’s work provides a standpoint from which social institu-

tions that fail to live up to his very demanding standards can be cri-

tiqued in the hopes of making them more legitimate and more just.

Armed with evidence that Habermasian discourse is achievable, this

Article surveys other Internet-based developments that may approach

the Habermasian ideal or, as in the case of the Internet Corporation

for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), that already claim a spe-

cial form of legitimacy. This Article finds most of these other stan-

dard-setting procedures wanting in comparison to the IETF.

Habermas seeks not only to define when a rulemaking system can

claim legitimacy for its outputs, but also to describe tendencies that af-

fect a modern society’s ability to realize his theory. 11 Speaking more as

a sociologist than a philosopher, Habermas has also suggested that the

forces needed to push public decisionmaking in the directions advo-

cated by his philosophy are likely to come from a re-energized, activist,

engaged citizenry working together to create new small-scale commu-

nicative associative institutions that over time either merge into larger

ones or at least join forces. Like Habermas’s idea of a practical dis-

course, this has the ring of something that may sound fine in theory

but is difficult to put into practice. New technology may, however, in-

crease the likelihood of achieving the Habermasian scenario of diverse

citizens’ groups engaging in practical discourses of their own. Tech-

nology may not compel outcomes, but it certainly can make difficult

things easier. 12 Although it is far too early to claim that the Internet

will realize this Habermasian vision, this Article suggests how new

Internet tools might, in time, help actualize this scenario. 13

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9 For essays with grander ambitions, see Mark Poster, CyberDemocracy: Internet and the

Public Sphere (1995), at http://www.humanities.uci.edu/mposter/writings/democ.html; and Alinta

Thornton, Does Internet Create Democracy? (2002), at http://www.zip.com.au/~athornto//.

10 See Stephen Chilton, The Problem of Agreement in Republicanism, Proceduralism, and the

Mature Dewey: A “Two Moments of Discourse Ethics” Analysis , at http://www.d.umn.edu/

~schilton/Articles/Tilburg.html (last modified Jan. 24, 2001) (“[D]iscourse ethics is frustrating, be-

cause it demands more agreement than we seem capable of.”). Even a friendly interpreter such as

William Rehg asks, “Is discourse ethics at all feasible?” W ILLIAM R EHG , I NSIGHT AND

S OLIDARITY : A S TUDY IN THE D ISCOURSE E THICS OF J ÜRGEN H ABERMAS 83 (1994). Rehg

grapples with the question but does not really resolve it. See id. at 83, 244–49.

11 See Hugh Baxter, System and Lifeworld in Habermas’s Theory of Law , 23 C ARDOZO L.

R EV . 473, 473 (2002) [hereinafter Baxter, System and Lifeworld ] (noting the two complementary

themes in Habermas’s work).

12 Cf. R ANDAL L. S CHWARTZ & T OM P HOENIX , L EARNING P ERL (3d ed. 2001) (noting on

cover: “Making Easy Things Easy & Hard Things Possible”).

13 In so doing it also provides an implicit critique of the thesis advanced by Cass Sunstein that

the Internet fragments communities and kills discourse. See C ASS S UNSTEIN , R EPUBLIC . COM

71 – 80 (2001).

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