Negotiating Internet Governance

Abstract

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.

Steering the governance of artificial intelligence: national strategies in perspective

“…The growing boundary permeability noted by hybrid governance scholars concerns not only sectors, but also practices and, crucially, knowledge. The enduring concentration of emerging technology expertise in private hands (Radu, 2019;Radu et al, 2014) is further accentuated. This complements more advanced commercial strategies of companies driving AI innovation, generally consolidating their position around two poles of (digital) power.…”

“…Whereas the rules and ethics directions are not contradictory and could potentially coexist, they represent regulatory regimes built on different values and trust systems. The general reluctance to regulate AI at an early stage is reminiscent of the approach chosen for regulating the Internet only when security and legal problems became widespread (Radu, 2019). It is also tightly linked to the fear of stifling innovation and the complex management of uncertainties inherent to new technologies, explicitly mentioned in some of the strategies.…”

“…Through patchwork legislation, the 'return of the state' in the AI field becomes more visible, but only in a fragmented way. All-purpose technology of this magnitude requires broader governance frameworks that restructure basic relations between the public and the private sector, as has been the case with the Internet (Radu, 2019;Radu, Chenou, & Weber, 2014). In this respect, national strategies reveal more clearly the innovations and limits of the public approach taken to govern artificial intelligence.…”

Consolidation in the DNS resolver market – how much, how fast, how dangerous?

“…Cloud services and content delivery networks all rely on the DNS, making the web experience as we know it today highly dependent on a technical functionality that has remained hidden in the technical layer and relatively abstruse in public discussion. With the exception of the political negotiations around the domain name registration system in particular the creation and subsequent reform of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the non-profit private American corporation that oversees the management of the DNS (Mueller 2004;Radu 2019)the dynamics in the domain name market and its recent concentration trends have not received enough scholarly attention. Significant exceptions include recent studies by Borgolte et al (2019) and Huston (2019), who started to shed light on effects that go beyond the technical aspects, assessing legal, economic and political consequences.…”

Fighting the ‘Infodemic’: Legal Responses to COVID-19 Disinformation

“…At the same time, intermediaries enforcing their own policies around health disinformation may pay little attention to protecting media freedom and pluralism. My previous research showed that reigning in disinformation on social platforms is part and parcel of broader internet governance transformations which started in 2016 ( Radu, 2019 ). During the COVID-19 crisis, stronger national approaches emerged and technology corporations acquired increased power as intermediaries that screen and take down content, in many cases in automated ways.…”