Internet Governance: Territorializing Cyberspace?

Abstract

Internet governance evolved in an ad hoc manner and produced a decentralized, regulatory environment that has been shaped by a myriad of public and private organizations. The decentralized nature of this form of Internet governance is now being challenged. New technical, security, and privacy issues have raised political questions concerning whether such loose regulatory coordination can adapt quickly enough to twenty-first-century challenges. Such doubts go well beyond the technical; they reflect profound questions about who should control the Internet. This article examines the issue of Internet governance in light of recent challenges. Discussion is centered on assessing efforts to replace the current decentralized, multistakeholder governance model with a centralized, multilateral model. Trends are examined with reference to efforts by some member states of the International Telecommunication Union to strengthen the role of governments in Internet regulation, especially during negotiations at the 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications.

Internet Fragmentation, Political Structuring, and Organizational Concentration in Transnational Engineering Networks

“…Studies of these institutions have been concerned about fragmentation. ICANN in particular has suffered legitimacy challenges from its establishment in 1998, faced venue-shifting efforts by governments such as China or Russia, and skepticism from the European Union on account of formal US government ties and dominance of US-based actors (de Nardis, 2014;Glen, 2014). Meeting places such as the IETF have faced similar criticism.…”

“…We examine two more outcomes: political structuring and organizational concentration . Starting with the former, scholars have drawn attention to the possibility that engineers in internet governance networks might come under governmental pressure to act in certain ways (Carr, 2015; Glen, 2014; Mueller, 2017). Mueller (2017) provides the example of engineers from China‐based academic and private organizations proposing a nationally controlled domain name system in the IETF.…”

After global governance

“…Lambach 2020, pp. 486-487;Glen 2014;Pohle and Thiel 2020;Goldsmith and Wu 2006). An important reason why the internet has become a central site for giving expression to the new practices of territorial sovereignty is that it is a prime example of a system-level technology.…”

Buying on Weixin/WeChat: Proposing a sociomaterial approach of platform studies

“…Drawing on examples from western, mainly America-based platforms (Srnicek, 2016;Bucher and Helmond, 2018) and increasingly so, Chinese platforms (Jia and Winseck, 2018), scholars contend that platform companies' interests and power are extended and expanded into our social experience and ways of living (van Dijck, Poell and de Waal, 2014;Nieborg and Helmond, 2019). The second stream focuses on the state's governance and regulation of platform to reinforce the state's political power domestically and abroad (Glen, 2014;Nocetti, 2015). China has been frequently cited for its governments' active usage of platforms to provide infrastructural utility (Chen and Qiu, 2019), national imagination and ideological construction (Wang and Lobato, 2019), and economic transformation (Hong, 2017).…”