Reimagining How to Govern the Internet (original) (raw)

Imagining the Internet: Communication, Innovation and Governance

Oxford University Press, 2012

This book is an impressive survey of our collective and cumulative understanding of the evolution of digital communication systems and the Internet. Whilst the information societies of the twenty-first century will develop ever more sophisticated technologies, the Internet is now a familiar and pervasive part of the world in which we live, work, and communicate. As such it is important to take stock of some fundamental questions - whether, for example, it contributes to progress, social cohesion, democracy, and growth - and at the same time to review the rich and varied theories and perspectives developed by thinkers in a range of disciplines over the last fifty years or more. In this remarkably comprehensive but concise and useful book, Robin Mansell summarizes key debates, and reviews the contributions of major thinkers in communication systems, economics, politics, sociology, psychology, and systems theory - from Norbert Wiener to Brian Arthur and Manuel Castells, and from Gregory Bateson to William Davidow and Sherry Turkle. This is an interdisciplinary and critical analysis of the way we experience the Internet in front of the screen, and of the developments behind the screen, all of which have implications for privacy ,security, intellectual property rights, and the overall governance of the Internet. The author presents fairly the ideas of the celebrants and the sceptics, and reminds us of the continuing need for careful, critical, and informed analysis of the paradoxes and challenges of the Internet, offering her own views on how we might move to greater empowerment, and suggesting policy measures and governance approaches that go beyond those commonly debated. This concise book will be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the challenges the Internet presents in the twenty-first century, and the debates and research that can inform that understanding.

A great review of three books on internet governance, including mine...

Recent scholarship provides the opportunity for an assessment of the underexplored but promising marriage between science and technology studies (STS) and Internet governance (IG) research. This article seeks to provide such an assessment by reviewing and discussing, in particular, three only incompletely so far, but are crucial to understand today's governance of the Internet as a complex sociotechnical system of systems. In their research, STS scholars of IG highlight the day-to-day, mundane practices that constitute IG; the plurality and ''networkedness'' of hybrid devices and arrangements that populate, shape, and define IG processes; the performative function of these arrangements vis-à-vis the virtual, yet very material, worlds they seek to regulate; the invisibility, pervasiveness, and agency of infrastructure.

Governance of the Internet: Emerging Issues

2000

The Internet and associated networks and devices are intruding throughout social and commercial activity. They are improving information exchange storage and utilisation to an extent that is re-shaping the structure and institutions of society that have evolved over centuries inresponse to information limitations. The phenomenal growth in Internet activity is now challenging the dominant use of networks by telephony despite effectively starting up just 6 years ago. The provision and utilisation of broad-band services has supplanted telephony as the central information issue of this decade.The purpose of this paper is to comment on issues that are arising in Internet governance in New Zealand and elsewhere. Such is the rate of change in the use of the Internet and in the concomitant technology that detailed prescription is not useful. Nevertheless changes that are taking place in the Internet provision imply that governance cannot be ignored. Enunciating the principles that should be...

Internet Governance; is it possible, desirable and likely?

The project offers an introductory analysis to the vast topic of the Internet Governance. The work is divided in several parts, following the standardized structure of state of the art, methodology, analyses and conclusion. Methodology this time is case analyses, which is applied in different contextes (the role of the Internet during the so called "Arab spring", Wikipedia and the case of the "Virgin killer" and the Stop Online Privacy Act). The work offers and overview of the cases and a direct application of the theoretical chapter to these. This is a semestral project submitted at Roskilde University, Denmark, in 2011.

How to regulate the internet: new paradigms for internet governance

E-Commerce Law and Practice in Europe, 2001

« We should like to stress the State's vital obligation to intervene at a time when, in our opinion, deserting the Internet and withdrawing from the field of regulation to such a point that it no longer even decides the general framework, would notably put at risk public order, fundamental liberties and other basic values ». Yves POULLET PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 1. POSITIONING THE PROBLEM * This paper was presented in the context of a conference organized by the Universities of Torino (Italia) and Yale (USA).