Governance in Namespaces, a paper by CIS Non-Residential Fellow Stefan Bechtold has been published in the ICANN symposium issue of the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review. It grew out of Stefan's work while he was a SPILS Fellow at Stanford Law School in 2001/2002.
The article shows that the ICANN governance discussions are just an example of the more abstract governance problems that occur in a set of technologies known as "namespaces." It develops a general theory of the governance of namespaces. Designing namespaces and exercising control over them is not a mere technical matter. Rather, the technical control over a namespace creates levers for the intrusion of politics, policy, and regulation. The article analyzes a wide variety of namespaces, including IP addresses, ENUM, Microsoft Passport, peer-to-peer systems, TCP port numbers, public key  infrastructures, digital rights management and instant messaging systems, bibliographic classification schemes, P.O. boxes, Social Security numbers, as well as the names of DNA sequences, diseases, and chemical compounds. In addition, the Article demonstrates that the "end-to-end argument" was implemented on the Internet by a particular design of the TCP/UDP port number space.
Stefan presented another paper as part of the CIS Lunchtime Speaker Series.