| Summary: |
internet governance conflicts are the new spaces where politi
cal and economic power is unfolding in the twenty- fi rst century. Technologies
of Internet governance increasingly mediate civil liberties such
as freedom of expression and individual privacy. They are entangled
with the preservation of national security and the arbitration of digital
commerce and innovation. The diff use nature of Internet governance
technologies is shifting historic control over these public interest areas
from traditional nation- state bureaucracy to private ordering and new
global institutions. Many of these governance functions are technically
and institutionally complicated and therefore out of public view. Yet how
confl icts over Internet governance are settled will determine some of the
most important public interest issues of our time.
The term “Internet governance†conjures up a host of seemingly
unrelated global controversies such as the prolonged Internet outage in
Egypt during po liti cal turmoil or Google’s decision not to acquiesce to
U.S. government requests to completely remove an incendiary po liti cal
video from YouTube. It invokes media narratives about the United Nations
trying to “take over†the Internet, cybersecurity concerns such as
denial of ser vice attacks, and the mercurial privacy policies of social
media companies. These issues exist only at the surface of a technologically
concealed and institutionally complex ecosystem of governance.
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