Online disinformation has been on the rise in recent years. A digital outbreak of disinformation has spread around the COVID-19 pandemic, often referred to as an “infodemic.” Since January 2020, digital media have been both the culprits of and antidotes to misinformation. The first months of the pandemic have shown that countering disinformation online has become as important as ensuring much needed medical equipment and supplies for health workers. For many governments around the world, priority COVID-19 actions included measures such as (a) providing guidance to social media companies on taking down contentious pandemic content (e.g., India); (b) establishing special units to combat disinformation (e.g., EU, UK); and (c) criminalizing malicious coronavirus falsehood, including in relation to public health measures. This article explores the short and potential long-term effects of newly passed legislation in various countries directly targeting COVID-19 disinformation on the media, whether traditional or digital. The early actions enacted under the state-of-emergency carve new directions in negotiating the delicate balance between freedom of expression and online censorship, in particular by imposing limitations on access to information and inducing self-restraint in reporting. Based on comparative legal analysis, this article provides a timely discussion of intended and unintended consequences of such legal responses to the “infodemic,” reflecting on a basic set of safeguards needed to preserve trust in online information.

As more and more governments release national strategies on artificial intelligence (AI), their priorities and modes of governance become more clear. This study proposes the first comprehensive analysis of national approaches to AI from a hybrid governance perspective, reflecting on the dominant regulatory discourses and the (re)definition of the public-private ordering in the making. It analyses national strategies released between 2017 and 2019, uncovering the plural institutional logics at play and the public-private interaction in the design of AI governance, from the drafting stage to the creation of new oversight institutions. Using qualitative content analysis, the strategies of a dozen countries (as diverse as Canada and China) are explored to determine how a hybrid configuration is set in place. The findings show a predominance of ethics-oriented rather than rule-based systems and a strong preference for functional indetermination as deliberate properties of hybrid AI governance.

Although the Internet is frequently referred to as a global public resource, its functioning remains predominantly controlled by private actors. The Internet brought about significant shifts in the way we conceptualize (global) governance. In particular, the handling of “big data” by private intermediaries has a direct impact on routine practices and personal lives. The implementation of the “right to be forgotten” following the May 2014 decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union against Google blurs the boundaries between the public and the private, and extends the responsibilities of the latter to court-style decision making. This article analyzes the regulatory developments in this area and the implications of outsourcing of important governance practices to private intermediaries. It looks at the decision-making process for the “right to be forgotten” to illustrate the extent to which the hybridization of such procedures results in new arrangements between public and private ordering in Internet governance.

What is at stake for how the Internet continues to evolve is the preservation of its integrity as a single network. In practice, its governance is neither centralized nor unitary; it is piecemeal and fragmented, with authoritative decision-making coming from different sources simultaneously: governments, businesses, international organizations, technical and academic experts, and civil society. Historically, the conditions for their interaction were rarely defined beyond basic technical coordination, due at first to the academic freedom granted to the researchers developing the network and, later on, to the sheer impossibility of controlling mushrooming Internet initiatives. Today, the search for global norms and rules for the Internet continues, be it for cybersecurity or artificial intelligence, amid processes fostering the supremacy of national approaches or the vitality of a pluralist environment with various stakeholders represented. This book provides an incisive analysis of the emergence and evolution of global Internet governance, unpacking the complexity of more than 300 governance arrangements, influential debates, and political negotiations over four decades. Highly accessible, this book breaks new ground through a wide empirical exploration and a new conceptual approach to governance enactment in global issue domains. A tripartite framework is employed for revealing power dynamics, relying on: (a) an extensive database of mechanisms of governance for the Internet at the global and regional level; (b) an in-depth analysis of the evolution of actors and priorities over time; and (c) a key set of dominant practices observed in the Internet governance communities. It explains continuity and change in Internet-related negotiations, opening up new directions for thinking and acting in this field.