Research articles on GOVERNANCE

The European Union is today seen as a ‘digital laggard’ which relies on divergent national regulation and whose digital policies lack coherence. This review looks back at internet policy making and makes a few prescriptions.

By retracing the stages of development of a 'peer-to-peer cloud' storage service, Francesca Musiani argues that decentralised network architectures are internet governance 'in practice'.

European countries' welfare increasingly depends on the services of the information society. This comes along with a price tag: continued increase of the cyber threat spectrum. Despite the need for coordinated efforts in cyber security, Europe lacks of common understanding.

Algorithms are hidden everywhere in our daily lives. They regulate us, in a sense. How can we, then, take part in the governance by algorithms?

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.