This paper examines which combinations of factors contribute to internet regulatory agencies' informal autonomy from corporate interests, building on a qualitative comparative analysis and interviews with senior officials.
News and Research articles on Internet governance
Governments around the world pressure internet companies to get informally what they cannot obtain through formal regulatory channels, a pervasive mechanism of governance that challenges fundamental democratic priors.
This article explores how governments, shifting from an anti-interventionist stance and views of regulatory impossibility, are embracing an infrastructural turn through strategies that include hijacking, and localising the "points of control" of the internet.
5G traffic insights: a regulator´s gateway to assess net neutrality.
This editorial introduces ten research articles, which form part of this special issue, exploring the governance of “European values” inside data flows.
This paper process-traces how European policymakers have delegated regulatory responsibilities to private certification and monitoring bodies acting as regulatory intermediaries. It explores how regulators can constrain or incentivise self-regulation that exists in their shadow via intermediaries, instead of using direct modes of regulation.
This essay analyses how the key concept of digital sovereignty has evolved into a discursive practice in digital policy worldwide.
Facing fragmentation of digital space in the Snowden aftermath, this article considers regulatory models available to avoid the balkanisation of the internet.
Why did China’s Alibaba platform reform its enforcement practices in line with demands from the US government and US companies?
Marianne Franklin is Professor of Global Media & Politics, convenor of the MA in Global Media and Transnational Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. We interviewed her in advance of the five year anniversary celebration of our journal.
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.
This paper discusses resolution of the contested meanings of inclusiveness, accountability and transparency in trade policymaking.
Disclosing and concealing: internet governance, information control and the management of visibility
Datafication leads to subtle forms of governance; this article explores them by drawing on science and technology studies as well as sociologies of visibility.
How did early network designers govern the internet before internet governance? With archival research, this article shows how designers conceived of the Domain Name System (DNS) as a solution to the problem of governing future network users.
Openness, inclusion and empowerment – how do these buzzwords determine the directions of access policy?
Internet governance bodies agree that improving online security is important, but disagree on what a more secure internet would look like.
This special issue calls to rethink how we conceptualise both internet and governance.
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.
One multi-stakeholder process is not like another, but how can we distinguish those that promote meaningful inclusion from those that don't?
The Russian 'dictatorship-of-the-law' paradigm is all but over: it is deploying online, with potentially harmful consequences for Russia's attempts to attract foreign investments in the internet sector, and for users' rights online.