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.
The EU plays a significant role in public policy aspects of Internet governance, having created in the late s the dot eu Internet Top Level Domain (TLD). This enables users to register names under a European online address label. This paper explores key public policy issues in the emergent governance system for dot eu, because it provides an interesting case of new European transnational private governance. Specifically, dot eu governance is a reconciliation resulting from a governance cultural clash between the European regulatory state and what can be described broadly as the Internet community. The EU has customised the governance of dot eu towards a public-private dispersed agencification model. The paper extends the evidence base on agencification within trans-European regulatory networks and the emergence of private transnational network governance characterised by self-regulation.
Much academic work on governance in recent years has explored responses which states have made to sectors of the economy, usually historically well-rooted nationally, which have been subject to globalizing pressures. Less work exists on responses which are being made to new parts of the economy emerging outside the nation state with inherently global characteristics. The Internet -and specifically its naming and addressing system -provides an example of how the state has aimed to assert public interest governance authority in a system initially absent its influence. This article explores the nature and consequences of this activity, in the process contributing to the study of the Internet and governance. Working within the limitations but also the opportunities created by policy norms developed at the global level, the article finds that the state has been instrumental in the development of novel public-private governance systems for Internet country code Top Level Domains.
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.
This article examines European telecommunications through the conceptual lenses of the ‘competition’ and the ‘regulatory’ state, exploring their complementarities and tensions. It analyses the EU's electronic communications regulatory framework, exposing contradictions in the EU‐level competition and regulatory state in telecommunications in the context of the well‐developed variety at the national level.
Social cues, such as eye gaze and pointing fingers, can increase the prioritisation of specific locations for cognitive processing. A previous study using a manual reaching task showed that, although both gaze and pointing cues altered target prioritisation (reaction times [RTs]), only pointing cues affected action execution (trajectory deviations). These differential effects of gaze and pointing cues on action execution could be because the gaze cue was conveyed through a disembodied head; hence, the model lacked the potential for a body part (i.e., hands) to interact with the target. In the present study, the image of a male gaze model, whose gaze direction coincided with two potential target locations, was centrally presented. The model either had his arms and hands extended underneath the potential target locations, indicating the potential to act on the targets (Experiment 1), or had his arms crossed in front of his chest, indicating the absence of potential to act (Experiment 2). Participants reached to a target that followed a nonpredictive gaze cue at one of three stimulus onset asynchronies. RTs and reach trajectories of the movements to cued and uncued targets were analysed. RTs showed a facilitation effect for both experiments, whereas trajectory analysis revealed facilitatory and inhibitory effects, but only in Experiment 1 when the model could potentially act on the targets. The results of this study suggested that when the gaze model had the potential to interact with the cued target location, the model's gaze affected not only target prioritisation but also movement execution.
Social cues, such as eye gaze and pointing fingers, can increase the prioritisation of specific locations for cognitive processing. A previous study using a manual reaching task showed that, although both gaze and pointing cues altered target prioritisation (reaction times [RTs]), only pointing cues affected action execution (trajectory deviations). These differential effects of gaze and pointing cues on action execution could be because the gaze cue was conveyed through a disembodied head; hence, the model lacked the potential for a body part (i.e., hands) to interact with the target. In the present study, the image of a male gaze model, whose gaze direction coincided with two potential target locations, was centrally presented. The model either had his arms and hands extended underneath the potential target locations, indicating the potential to act on the targets (Experiment 1), or had his arms crossed in front of his chest, indicating the absence of potential to act (Experiment 2). Participants reached to a target that followed a nonpredictive gaze cue at one of three stimulus onset asynchronies. RTs and reach trajectories of the movements to cued and uncued targets were analysed. RTs showed a facilitation effect for both experiments, whereas trajectory analysis revealed facilitatory and inhibitory effects, but only in Experiment 1 when the model could potentially act on the targets. The results of this study suggested that when the gaze model had the potential to interact with the cued target location, the model's gaze affected not only target prioritisation but also movement execution.
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