Research articles on Infrastructure & Standards

Flawed cloud architectures and the rise of decentral alternatives

Primavera De Filippi, Research and Studies Center of Administrative Science (CERSA/CNRS), Université Paris II (Panthéon-Assas)
PUBLISHED ON: 01 Nov 2013 DOI: 10.14763/2013.4.212

Currently dominant cloud services raise challenges in terms of security, privacy and user autonomy. Decentralisation, advocated by civil society, may overcome some of the drawbacks.

Network architecture as internet governance

Francesca Musiani, MINES ParisTech
PUBLISHED ON: 24 Oct 2013 DOI: 10.14763/2013.4.208

Changes in the internet's architectural design affect the repartition of competences and responsibilities between service providers, content producers, users and network operators. This article outlines the dialectic between centralised and distributed architectures, institutions and practices, and how they mutually affect each other.

Cloud computing: analysing the trade-off between user comfort and autonomy

Primavera De Filippi, Research and Studies Center of Administrative Science (CERSA/CNRS), Université Paris II (Panthéon-Assas)
PUBLISHED ON: 13 Jun 2013 DOI: 10.14763/2013.2.135

This article presents a general analysis of how user autonomy in the internet cloud is increasingly put into jeopardy by the growing comfort and efficiency of the user-interface. Although this issue has not been, thus far, explicitly addressed by the law, it is a fundamental ethical question that should be carefully assessed to guide the future

Dangerous Liaisons? Governments, companies and Internet governance

Francesca Musiani, MINES ParisTech
PUBLISHED ON: 18 Feb 2013 DOI: 10.14763/2013.1.108

Private actors in the information technology sector are currently playing an increasingly important role in content mediation, as well as in regulation of online forms of expression, with implications for both internet rights and economic freedom. The latest Google Transparency Report (Google, 2013) released on January 24, 2013, sends a clear and

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