The volume explores the consequences of recent events in global Internet policy and possible ways forward following the 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12). It offers expert views on transformations in governance, the future of multistakeholderism and the salience of cybersecurity. Based on the varied backgrounds of the contributors, the book provides an interdisciplinary perspective drawing on international relations, international law and communication studies. It addresses not only researchers interested in the evolution of new forms of transnational networked governance, but also practitioners who wish to get a scholarly reflection on current regulatory developments. It notably provides firsthand accounts on the role of the WCIT-12 in the future of Internet governance.
A groundbreaking study of one of the most crucial yet least understood issues of the twenty-first century: the governance of the Internet and its content
This book provides an incisive analysis of the emergence and evolution of global Internet governance, revealing its mechanisms, key actors and dominant community practices. Based on extensive empirical analysis covering more than four decades, it presents the evolution of Internet regulation from the early days of networking to more recent debates on algorithms and artificial intelligence, putting into perspective its politically-mediated system of rules built on technical features and power differentials. For anyone interested in understanding contemporary global developments, this book is a primer on how norms of behaviour online and Internet regulation are renegotiated in numerous fora by a variety of actors - including governments, businesses, international organisations, civil society, technical and academic experts - and what that means for everyday users. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
How institutions for Internet governance are emerging from the tension between the territorially bound nation-state and a transnational network society. When the prevailing system of governing divides the planet into mutually exclusive territorial monopolies of force, what institutions can govern the Internet, with its transnational scope, boundless scale, and distributed control? Given filtering/censorship by states and concerns over national cybersecurity, it is often assumed that the Internet will inevitably be subordinated to the traditional system of nation-states. In Networks and States, Milton Mueller counters this, showing how Internet governance poses novel and fascinating governance issues that give rise to a global politics and new transnational institutions. Drawing on theories of networked governance, Mueller provides a broad overview of Internet governance from the formation of ICANN to the clash at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the formation of the Internet Governance Forum, the global assault on peer-to-peer file sharing, and the rise of national-level Internet control and security concerns. Internet governance has become a source of conflict in international relations. Networks and States explores the important role that emerging transnational institutions could play in fostering global governance of communication-information policy.
The editor of this new Routledge title argues that our economic and social lives are now utterly dependent upon the successful coordination of the Internet. Moreover, as the Internet expands from its current form to an 'Internet of things', she suggests that its stability and security will soon be recognized as important as other global concerns, like battling terrorism and fighting climate change. Who controls the Internet? The question has profound implications for our access to knowledge, the pace of economic growth, and the protection of human rights, not least freedom of expression and the right to privacy. And the question's importance has been underscored in recent times by landmark events, including revelations about the actual and potential power of social-media companies, and the breathtaking extent of surveillance by intelligence and security organizations, such as the NSA in the United States and Britain's GCHQ. It is perhaps only in the last several years that issues about and around the governance of the Internet have entered the public consciousness, but serious academic and policy work dates back decades. And now there is a critical mass of scholarship that can usefully be collected under the rubric of 'Internet Governance'. Like the Internet itself, leading theorists and researchers in the field are distributed globally, and work in disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. Indeed, much of the relevant literature remains inaccessible or is highly specialized and compartmentalized, so that it is difficult for many of those who are interested in the subject to obtain an informed, balanced, and comprehensive overview. This new four-volume collection, published as part of Routledge's acclaimed series, Critical Concepts in Sociology, meets the need for a reference work to make sense of the subject's vast and dispersed literature and the continuing explosion in research output.
John Mathiason tells the story of the internet governance, where the linkage between technology, information, individuals, old regulatory regimes and new approaches have led to a great experiment, what a volume produced by the United Nations Information and Communications Technology Task Force called "A Grand Collaboration".
Scholars from a range of disciplines discuss research methods, theories, and conceptual approaches in the study of internet governance. The design and governance of the internet has become one of the most pressing geopolitical issues of our era. The stability of the economy, democracy, and the public sphere are wholly dependent on the stability and security of the internet. Revelations about election hacking, facial recognition technology, and government surveillance have gotten the public's attention and made clear the need for scholarly research that examines internet governance both empirically and conceptually. In this volume, scholars from a range of disciplines consider research methods, theories, and conceptual approaches in the study of internet governance.
What are the global implications of the looming shortage of Internet addresses and the slow deployment of the new IPv6 protocol designed to solve this problem? The Internet has reached a critical point. The world is running out of Internet addresses. There is a finite supply of approximately 4.3 billion Internet Protocol (IP) addresses—the unique binary numbers required for every exchange of information over the Internet—within the Internet's prevailing technical architecture (IPv4). In the 1990s the Internet standards community selected a new protocol (IPv6) that would expand the number of Internet addresses exponentially—to 340 undecillion addresses. Despite a decade of predictions about imminent global conversion, IPv6 adoption has barely begun. Protocol Politics examines what's at stake politically, economically, and technically in the selection and adoption of a new Internet protocol. Laura DeNardis's key insight is that protocols are political. IPv6 intersects with provocative topics including Internet civil liberties, US military objectives, globalization, institutional power struggles, and the promise of global democratic freedoms. DeNardis offers recommendations for Internet standards governance, based not only on technical concerns but on principles of openness and transparency, and examines the global implications of looming Internet address scarcity versus the slow deployment of the new protocol designed to solve this problem.
