The standards development organization’s (SDO) role in Internet governance is notable given its central place in society. The bulk of decision-making for the Internet takes place in technical standards fora, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which have no formal state or public sector body membership. Recent years have seen a significant degree of spill-over of highly politicized policy areas such as data protection, digital rights management, security, and bandwidth and spectrum to SDOs, policies which were formerly domains of the nation state. SDOs are grappling with the efficiency of cloud storage, limits of spectrum use, and autonomy and management of devices. Security questions abound as demonstrated by the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Snowden revelations. The book breaks new ground by exploring decision-making within SDOs. It provides an invaluable insight into a world, which, although highly technical, affects the way in which citizens live and work on a daily basis. The work stands out from existing literature on Internet governance, which focuses on international organizations such as the United Nations (UN), the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). As such, it adds significantly to the trajectory of research that explores the relationship between politics and protocols. It explains the interplay between different interests and whether civil society and other actors are able to defend and promote citizens’ rights within SDOs. As such, it contributes to knowledge about how the public interest is promoted.
This article has three main objectives. Firstly, it seeks to re-formulate the debate on technocracy in the European Union by drawing upon the concept of the EU regulatory state as developed by Majone (1996). Secondly, it illustrates the limits and tensions of a once politicised technocratic policy-making process by tracing the formulation of media ownership regulation. Although media ownership policy has been presented by the European Commission as a typical regulatory policy, it has followed a more politicised path than previous EU regulatory policies. This implies that media ownership policy does not follow the model of technocratic regulation presented by Majone in his characterisation of the EU regulatory state. Thirdly, the paper contributes to the debate on EU regulation by suggesting a new typology of regulatory policies in the EU. In the conclusion, it is argued that politicisation (which includes inefficiency and prolonged conflict) may be the price that the EU is forced to pay in its progress toward a more democratic polity.
This introductory chapter charts the debate on and importance of global standard-setting for the Internet and for Internet governance more broadly. Despite being highly contested, the importance of standards-developing organizations (SDOs) for ensuring and maintaining the openness, interconnectivity, and security of the Internet are critical. Their utility is outlined before setting out the central guiding questions, and aims and objectives of the book, theoretically and empirically. The added value of the approach taken in relation to SDO decision-making is explicated. The chapter then details developments within SDOs to address the public interest. It concludes with the structure, argument, and logic of the remaining chapters, with explanation of the choice of case studies, namely privacy/security, mobile communications standards, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), and copyright. Each chapter in the book assesses the public interest in SDO decision-making and the mechanisms that have affected the direction of standards’ development.
The article addresses the politics of agenda-setting in the European Union (EU) policy process by utilizing the case of media ownership regulation. The author argues that the selection of a 'frame' (as defined in Schön and Rein, 1994) for media ownership regulation has been the object of conflict between and within EU institutions, most crucially within the Commission. Conflict, however, has been a resource in the policy process as it has brought in different legitimate interests and perspectives. The article has theoretical implications for the study of agenda-setting, organizational behaviour in the EU, and the analysis of the EU policy process.
This article examines the phenomenon of policy transfer in the EU accession countries of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. When formulating media laws in the early 1990s, these countries were presented with models put forth by advisors from the US and EU Member States. Advisors proposed models based upon their own domestic policy and/or organisation agendas. A resulting 'battle of the models' can be observed with different experts and actors lobbying for the adoption of contrasting regulatory models. Underlying this were often political, economic and trade interests. In particular, 'Western' governments were interested in guaranteeing the opening of new markets, and the stability of these new media markets for Western capital investment, as well as wider political concerns of consolidating democracy in Europe. Interest groups and NGOs wished to transfer their ideas to Eastern Europe often in advocacy of their own agendas in an enlarged Europe.
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