Internet Regulation ; Governance without the state, an exercise in global cooperation

Abstract

Research Description: The increase of online fraud and identity theft, privacy incursions, copyright infringements, domain name disputes, and spamming has fuelled cross-border concerns regarding the governance of the Internet. These issues have become a concern to citizens, interest groups, NGOs as well as governments, as they threaten public interest, and contradict regulations established at national levels. Moreover, since the Internet faces similar ethical and policy challenges as the old media, it draws upon an extremely wide range of ethics codes and practices. The purpose of this thesis is to identify and conceptualise the unique challenges in regulating these complex, global and multi-functional phenomena, as well as to evaluate the evolving options for reform of Internet regulation through the wider contemporary debate. Since the current Internet governance literature lacks clarity regarding the roles of non-state actors, it is the intention of this thesis to build instead upon the state-centric approach to analysing soft forms of governance. A deeper understanding of how the practice of relationships between the stakeholders influences the Internet will be explored, in terms of content, infrastructure and multistakeholderism. As a result, this approach will generate a basis for, and develop a conceptual framework of governance to guide the research, focusing on the study of the relationships among a combination of actors. Further to the content layer of the Internet, the research also covers the regulatory activities relevant to the code and infrastructure layers. Finally, self-regulation of numbering (ICANN) and standards (e.g. IETF) mechanisms of Internet governance represent a different set of policy and legal trade-offs. Due to the complex nature of legal and policy making mechanisms, trade-offs that directly influence the internets global regulation are debated and analysed and thus contributing to the wider literature on soft governance. The need for such an investigation is imperative from both the academic and policymaking perspectives. The contribution of this thesis to the academic world lies in the way that it shows how application of the Internet has become the central argument for the current re-shaping of political institutions. Understanding how non-state actors have emerged as powerful actors in an era of global, digital networks is an important contribution to the development of a body of knowledge on the structure and logic of politics and policymaking. This in turn helps policymakers at the global and national levels understand how to shape their policies and governance institutions to ensure the most appropriate and efficient use of resources are applied.