News and Research articles on Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)

Management of the internet by the principle of the multistakeholder governance model has survived attempts of replacing it with inter-government management. What additional principles are useful to guide global internet governance and enhance ICANN’s legitimacy, seen in light of recent challenges? Are the disagreements over global internet governance also about diverging understandings of the goals in internet governance?

Communication and internet policy: a critical rights-based history and future

Aphra Kerr, Maynooth University
Francesca Musiani, National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)
Julia Pohle, Berlin Social Science Center (WZB)
PUBLISHED ON: 31 Mar 2019 DOI: 10.14763/2019.1.1395

This issue brings together a selection of articles presented in the Communication Policy and Technology section of the IAMCR conference in 2018.

What kind of cyber security? Theorising cyber security and mapping approaches

Laura Fichtner, University of Hamburg
PUBLISHED ON: 15 May 2018 DOI: 10.14763/2018.2.788

This paper explores how four approaches to cyber security are constructed, motivated and justified by different values such as privacy, economic order and national security and what this means for the actors involved.

Accountability challenges confronting cyberspace governance

Jacqueline Eggenschwiler, University of Oxford
PUBLISHED ON: 20 Sep 2017 DOI: 10.14763/2017.3.712

Cyberspace governance struggles with three accountability challenges, the problem of many hands, the profusion of issue areas, as well as the hybridity and malleability of institutional arrangements. In order to address and mitigate these challenges, accountability relationships need to be consciously reframed and discursively constructed.

Coding and encoding rights in internet infrastructure

Stefania Milan, University of Amsterdam
Niels ten Oever, Article 19 & University of Amsterdam
PUBLISHED ON: 17 Jan 2017 DOI: 10.14763/2017.1.442

Do ICANN’s policies and operations have an impact on human rights? Civil society engagement in the organisation seeks to inscribe human rights in internet infrastructure.

Doing internet governance: practices, controversies, infrastructures, and institutions

Dmitry Epstein, University of Illinois at Chicago
Christian Katzenbach, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG)
Francesca Musiani, Université Paris-Sorbonne
PUBLISHED ON: 30 Sep 2016 DOI: 10.14763/2016.3.435

This special issue calls to rethink how we conceptualise both internet and governance.

Analysing internet policy as a field of struggle

Julia Pohle, Berlin Social Science Center (WZB)
Maximilian Hösl, Berlin Social Science Center (WZB)
Ronja Kniep, Berlin Social Science Center (WZB)
PUBLISHED ON: 25 Jul 2016 DOI: 10.14763/2016.3.412

The internet and its regulation are the result of continuous conflicts. By analysing policy fields as fields of struggle, this essay proposes to observe processes of discursive institutionalisation to uncover core conflicts inscribed into internet policy.

While intermediary liability is becoming an issue of increasing importance in internet governance discussions, little is being made at the institutional level to minimise conflicts across jurisdictions and ensure the compliance of intermediary liability laws with fundamental rights and the freedom to innovate.