From Cyber-Libertarianism to Neoliberalism: Internet Exceptionalism, Multi-stakeholderism, and the Institutionalisation of Internet Governance in the 1990s

Towards a Global Digital Constitutionalism: A Radical New Agenda for UN75

“…The parameters of ‘development’, it is assumed, are best understood by elite corporate actors who are to be left untouched by the stifling tyranny of regulation. This myth rests on a number of discursive planks of corporate hegemony: ‘Internet exceptionalism’, which holds that the distributed, decentralized and democratic character of the global Internet will be thwarted by any conventional multilateral approach to its governance (Chenou 2014 ); ‘free global data flows’, which considers any effort to regulate cross-border flows of data as a potentially fatal blow to informational freedoms on the Internet-mediated global public sphere (Gurumurthy et al 2017 ); ‘the global community of users’, which reframes market interests as freedom, flexibility, convenience and even collaboration, sharing and solidarity for the Internet users of the world (Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010 ); and ‘data for development’, which views data extractivist strategies as the magic bullet for development pathways in the digital economy (Gurumurthy and Chami 2019 ).…”

After global governance

“…5 For insightful accounts of the political debate on the administration of the Internet cf. Broeders (2017), Budnitsky and Lianrui (2018), Chenou (2014), Radu (2019).…”

“…The system de facto allows US governmental agencies to collect enormous amounts of data by cooperating with private corporations and thus to establish a new structure of authority based on a nontransparent compound of private and public power (Erikkson and Giacomello 2006, p. 232;De Nardis 2014, p. 38). The mobilization of the private sector to drive internet growth is thus often seen as a proxy for US national interest (Carr 2015) and is meeting with growing concern by other states (Hill 2014;Chenou 2014).…”

The pornographic state: the changing nature of state regulation in addressing illegal and harmful online content

“…Private actors often claimed that the Internet could not be regulated and vented their faith in the Internet to withstand state attempts to censor content. Much of the logic behind their argument stemmed from long-established beliefs of the ‘technical elite’ who designed the Internet prior to its commercialisation in the mid-1990s (Chenou, 2014: 215) and who believed the Internet was a robust and damage-proof network that remained impervious to censorship. During interviews with executives from the IIA and Google, the Internet was frequently conceptualised in biological terms, as a self-healing organism that could ‘self-correct’ and ‘self-regenerate’ (Interview with IIA executive, 13 July 2012) so that information would always ‘find a way through’ (Interview with Google executive, 20 October 2011).…”