Research articles on GOVERNANCE

There are significant dangers in surveilling online communications unless the mechanisms and policies of surveillance are subject to strict and legally enforceable standards of transparency, oversight, and control.

gTLDs are the highest level of domain names in the domain name system, including .com, .net and .org; their number has been restricted to twenty-two for several years. This will change, as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) - the organisation responsible for managing and coordinating the system - rolls out a new gTLDs programme. Businesses and organisations are now able to apply for their own customised top-level domain names. But ICANNs move is mired in controvery, as Francesca Musiani reveals.

Tax avoidance has become a widespread practice on the internet. Online operators easily circumvent an aging taxation scheme that is designed around the concept of territorial jurisdiction and geographical settings. The French government now commissioned a study to find out how to effectively deal with internet giants that generate hardly any revenue for states they largely operate in.

Liberal democracies are increasingly considering internet filtering as a means to assert state control over online information exchanges. A variety of filtering techniques have been implemented in Western states to prevent access to certain content deemed harmful. This development poses a series of democratic and ethical questions, particularly when states introduce regulation mandating ISPs to block online content. A first version of this article was previously published at the FOCI'12 conference.

Ten years after the first World Summit on the Information Society, WSIS+10 was held in February 2013 at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. Internet governance scholar Francesca Musiani attended and reports back with a critical assessment of the “multi-stakeholder” approach to global governance of information and communication technologies.

Cloud computing is an inherently international matter, because it usually involves storage and processing of data in different locations. However, regulatory frameworks in non-EU contries do not always live up to European demands, i.e. concerning data protection. Looking at the EU cloud computing strategy, three political mechanisms can be identified through which the EU might try to promote regulatory changes beyond its borders.

Cloud computing provides a large number of advantages to many internet users. Most of the perceived benefits are related to the concept of ubiquity, or the ability to access data from anywhere at any time, regardless of the device used. Yet, these benefits come at a cost. The widespread deployment of cloud computing services is source of growing concern as regards the fundamental rights of EU citizens.

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 somewhat disquieting message to the advocates of a more transparent internet governance worldwide. Several governments in the European Union are submitting a steadily increasing number of requests to the giant of online information search, with two purposes: the acquisition of several types of sensitive information about internet users – including …