Lecture 5 - Governance

Question 1

Explain the internet architecture using an hourglass

Answer 1

• At the top there are applications and the bottom is physical infrastructure.
  o These two can’t exist without each other, but don’t care what the other is doing.
• What glues them together is the technical and logical layer of the internet.

Question 2

What is the narrow and broad approach to governance?

Answer 2

1. Narrow approach
   a. Only the technical/logical layer is governed. The internet infrastructure involves among other things domain name systems, IP addresses, protocols and rootservers.
2. Broad approach
   a. All layers are governed, so the application, technical and physical layer. These layers involve larger themes regarding crime and security, economic issues, human rights, development and culture.
   b. A danger in this approach is that with the exponentially growing internet infrastructure and increasing digitalization, a lot more issues will become the issue of internet governance. And soon everything will be linked to internet governance, blurring internet governance at the edges.

Question 3

What is the definition of internet governance?

Answer 3

“Internet governance is the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.” - World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), 2005

Question 4

What is the difference between Governance of the internet is
and governance on the internet:

Answer 4

• Governance of the internet is how technical bodies govern the technical/logical layer (narrow approach) of the internet.
• Governance on the internet is about governing the internet as a whole, also including privacy and data protection, cybersecurity and cybercrime, child protection, jurisdiction, etc.

Question 5

Who governs the internet?

Answer 5

Nowadays there is no unilateral system involved in governing the internet.’
- Rather, the systems of governance are getting more open and more complex, as the internet is getting more open and more complex.

Question 6

What are the elements of polycentric governance SCHOLTE

Answer 6

polycentric governance, a system of governance in which many centers of decision making authority exist. (Scholte)

1. Trans-scalarity
2. Trans-sectorality
3. Diffusion
4. Fluidity
5. Overlapping mandates
6. Ambiguity in hierarchies
7. No final arbiter

Question 7

What is the Multilateral and Multistakeholder model?

Answer 7

1. multilateral model: a process of organizing relations between nation-states.
2. multistakeholder model: a practice of governance that employs bringing multiple stakeholders together, extending beyond nation-states.
   a. Stakeholder include the private sector (businesses), civil society, end users, governments, security specialists, etc.

Question 8

What are the characteristics and differences between the multistakeholder and multilateral model?

Answer 8

Question 9

Who governs the internet?

Answer 9

From the early days of the internet it was governed by the technical community (IETF and RFC), already taking the form of a multistakeholder model.
- The layer developed into multiple independent actors, common principles and mutual commitments, because all had the same mutual goal. Namely, and security of the internet’s logical layer.
- This facilitated the development of policies and standards in an inclusive manner.

• IETF for Protocols
• IANA for identifiers (ICANN)

Question 10

What kind of ecosystem is ICANN?

Answer 10

The ICANN ecosystem is a multistakeholder community.
- The community is not employed by ICANN and they create policies (supporting organisations) and give advice (advisory committes).
o The policy development processes are open to everyone and consensus driven.
- Governments (Governmental Advisory Committee) are allowed to provide advice, but they don’t have a policy-making function

Question 11

Who does governance of the internet?

Answer 11

while governance of the internet (logical layer) is done by organizations such as ICANN, IETF, IANA, NRO and RIRs, governance on the internet is only discussed at the Internet Governance Forum, and they can’t even produce binding outcomes

Question 12

Why are there concerns for internet fragmentation?

Answer 12

• However, Russia and China are still connected to the global network, as the computers still speak the same language.
  o Russia, China and other countries are pushing for the technical layer to be under UN control.
  o ICANN is located in the US and so it is subjects to its sanctions. They argue that since it is global critical infrastructure this might be a problem.
• Legitimacy, global interoperability and global connectivity is based on trust.
  o Protocols, DNS, and standards were developed and widely adopted because the global community put trust in them.

Question 13

What are the elements of polycentric governance?

Answer 13

1. Trans-scalarity
   a. Polycentric governance transpires through regional, country and local remits. interplays of agencies with global, Polycentric regulation is not fixed in any geographical sphere, but rather combines institutions which work on different scales
   b. Internet governance is therefore not focused on any level – local, national, regional, global or otherwise – but operates through trans-scalar mixes
   c. The key general point is that internet governance arises from – and requires – combined scales, rather than separate levels
2. Trans-sectorality
   a. Polycentric regulation combines governmental, commercial and civil society actors
   i. Sometimes elements from different sectors come together in a single ‘ multi-stakeholder’ institution (like ICANN).
   ii. Thus, with polycentrism, the formulation and implementation of societal rules (in this case for the internet) is not a matter for the public sector alone.
   iii. Thus, just as polycentric internet governance cannot be isolated on any scale, it cannot be confined to any sector either
3. Diffusion
   a. As both trans-scalarity and trans-sectorality indicate, polycentric governance is spread across multiple entities rather than concentrated in one or two places
   b. Governance of the internet, as shown by the manifold agencies named earlier, is scattered over many institutional sites. Internet regulation is not consolidated in a single ‘world state’, but unfolds from multifarious locales
   c. Within a nation state, too, internet policy is often diffused across several ministries, including those for communications, defence, development cooperation, economy and justice.
   d. Moreover, the scattered agencies in internet governance often operate with substantial autonomy from one another
   i. Moreover, the scattered agencies in internet governance often operate with substantial autonomy from one another
4. Fluidity
   a. As well as being scattered across spatial locations, polycentric governance tends also to be highly changeable over time.
5. Overlapping Mandates
   a. Polycentric governance often involves overlapping jurisdictions, where multiple agencies can claim competence over a given regulatory circumstance.
   i. Further contests around jurisdiction can arise when the online activity of an actor based in one state jurisdiction affects actors in other state jurisdictions.
6. Ambiguous Hierarchies
   a. Polycentric governance often shows unclear and contestable lines of command between regulatory institutions.
   i. Official principles and procedures are often lacking to establish relative primacy among the diffuse sites of internet governance and their sometimes overlapping competences.
7. Absence of a final arbiter
   a. Polycentric governance lacks an ultimate decision point
   i. Old-style so-called Westphalian regulation designated the state as the ‘sovereign’ authority for each territorial jurisdiction, but polycentric governance lacks a final arbiter.
   b. And like many other areas of contemporary public policy, internet governance has not had – and shows no sign of acquiring – an agreed designated site of ultimate decision.

Question 14

What are the promises and challenges of polycentric governance?

Answer 14

• Polycentric governance poses both opportunities and challenges for internet governance.
  o Potential promises include:
   A richness of policy inputs when multiple and different actors are involved.
   Less chance that issues get overlooked.
   Possibilities for advocates to ‘forum shop’ in order to obtain desired policies.
  o Potential challenges include:
   Capacity building as officials and citizens confront more complex regulatory frameworks.
   Inefficient duplication of policy efforts by several institutions.
   Lack of coherence, coordination and control among multifarious governance actors.
   Difficulty with determining accountability when so many interconnected parties address a policy problem.

Question 15

What Six designs for participation and control by affected people in polycentrism

Answer 15

Six designs for participation and control by affected people in polycentrism:
1. Communitarianism
a. Communitarian arguments hold that democracy beyond nation-state units is impossible
i. 1. Spaces beyond countries are too large for popular control.
ii. 2. Global and regional governance institutions cannot adequately connect with constituents on the ground.
iii. 3. No demos beyond the nation is possible
b. From a communitarian perspective, globalisation inherently contradicts people’s power and the way to reaffirm democracy in contemporary society is to roll back these trends and reinvigorate sovereign nation states.
c. Rules for the internet should to the greatest possible extent remain within the domain of territorial nation states.
2. Multilateralism
a. Rules for the internet should to the greatest possible extent remain within the domain of territorial nation states.
b. On the multilateralist formula, the way to democracy on issues such as internet governance is a universalisation of modern liberal democracy at the country level
i. These democratic states can then together exercise ‘joint’, ‘pooled’ or ‘shared’ sovereignty in regional and global intergovernmental institutions.
ii. These intergovernmental and transgovernmental institutions might consult with non state actors in order to get supplementary democratic inputs; however, multilateralism holds that the actual governance should be done by states
3. Cosmopolitan federalism
a. oppose internet regulation through the various private and hybrid bodies that are currently active
b. In other words, democracy in internet governance would be achieved with the enactment of supra state human rights, supra-state citizenship, supra-state civil society, and supra-state representative bodies populated by supra-state political parties
4. Stakeholder democracy
a. In so-called multi-stakeholder initiatives, policymaking bodies include voting positions not only for states, but also for circles such as business, labour, consumers, and other groups that ‘hold a stake’ in the issue-area concerned.
5. Deliberation
a. Deliberative democracy, seeks to sustain larger, more diverse and more critical policy debates of a kind that can be lost in the context of formally institutionalised stakeholder involvement
b. Deliberative approaches are concerned less with interest representation and more with the quality of public discussion.
6. Counter-hegemonic resistance
a. deeper democracy only occurs when social movements struggle to overturn prevailing structures of domination.

Question 16

Explain Phase one of the history of internet governance (Mueller)

Answer 16

• Phase One (1993-1997): Discovery and Exceptionalism
  o That emergence was contingent on three events:
   The development and adoption of the World Wide Web protocol from 1989 1993.
   The publication of freely downloadable web browser software after 1991.
   The privatization of the Internet backbone and its opening to commercial use by the US National Science Foundation in 1995.
  o Together, these developments made the Internet accessible to ordinary businesses and end users.
  o The most notable and interesting feature of the earliest Internet governance discourse is its vigorous debate on conceiving of cyberspace as its own place, or what some have called Internet exceptionalism.
   It was a discussion to which extent cyberspace was a terrain that should develop its own rules and institutions and how it should be governed.
  o Some internet exceptionalists called for:
   Decentralized, emergent law as an alternative to traditional hierarchical, state centric control (Johnson & Post, 1996).
   Multistakeholder collaboration and bottom-up rulemaking (Hardy, 1994).
  o However it was, as the next phase explains, the formation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that cemented the term “Internet governance” into place
  o Novel legal issues raised by the commercialization of the Internet were:
   Trademark law and domain names.
   Intermediary responsibility and copyright protection.
   Censorship and filtering of Internet content.
   Private contract law versus public law and jurisdictional conflict.
  o Conservative legal scholars reacted against this interest in cyberlaw, insisting that there was no new cyber jurisdiction or territory or that calls for a new jurisdiction constituted a call for “cyber-anarchy
  o A key feature of this period is that the Internet governance field is rooted in legal studies.
   Yet in this first phase, North America is overwhelmingly the center of research and writing. Very little attention is paid to the implications of Internet growth and policy to other nations or cultures or to how Internet governance might play into interstate rivalries.

Question 17

Explain phase two of the history on internet governance (Mueller)

Answer 17

• Phase Two (1996-2003): ICANN Über Alles
  o The term “Internet governance” came to prominence in 1996–1999, when it became associated with the struggle to create a new institution to take over global coordination of Internet domain names and IP addresses
   The formation of ICANN took center stage in Internet governance discourse and research, and the term “Internet governance” became widely used to describe this area.
  o Research and writing during this period shifted away from more abstract exceptionalism debates to the question of building a real governance institution
   Few actors in a position of influence wanted the Internet to be subsumed under existing intergovernmental regimes, so this culminated in an institutional innovation, the ICANN.
  o The formation of the ICANN regime resolved conflicts over property rights that had been created by attempts to appropriate new global technical resources (primarily domain names).
   It also addressed the coordination problems posed by managing critical Internet resources in a manner that would retain global compatibility.
  o ICANN was controversial because it was a private nonprofit corporation unilaterally delegated by the United States to be the global authority over the root of the domain name and Internet address spaces and empowered to resolve key public policy problems through the issuance of private contracts.
   This problematique led to the creation and gradual empowerment of ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC).
• The GAC was a strange beast: simultaneously a mini-intergovernmental organization composed of representatives of nation-states and an organ of a private California nonprofit public benefit corporation offering nonbinding advice to the organization.

Question 18

Explain Phase Three of internet governance (Mueller)

Answer 18

• Phase Three (2003-2009): World Summit on the Information Society and Internet Governance Forum
  o In the 2003–2009 phase, Internet governance becomes fully recognized as a domain of global governance, and the boundaries of what is considered Internet governance expand beyond ICANN.
   Large-scale global intermediaries (such as Facebook and Google) residing on the Internet transformed the context in which traditional communication policy issues were debated.
  o But the key turning point in both research field formation and the actual practice of governance was the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)
   During the WSIS, which lasted from 2002 to 2005, ICANN became the provocation for international clashes over the US role in Internet governance and the position of state and nonstate actors in shaping it.
  o In the early stages of the WSIS process, definitional debates centered on the distinction between a
   narrow approach; encompassing only ICANN-related functions.
   and a broad approach; seeming to include anything and everything related to information and communication technologies
  o In its agreed definition, the WGIG expanded the meaning of Internet governance beyond ICANN.
   Namely, any and all “ shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet”.
  o These shared processes involved not just governments but business and civil society as well. These shared processes involved not just governments but business and civil society as well.
  o What had been described as private sector leadership or self-regulation in the early days of ICANN’s formation was now repackaged as the multistakeholder model.
   Intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations and intergovernmental processes such as the WSIS had to be opened up to civil society and the private sector.
  o WSIS created a new set of expectations regarding the ability of civil society actors to participate in global Internet governance processes
   While it failed to resolve the debates about ICANN and the US unilateral role in Internet governance, it did create a new institutional vehicle for carrying on discussion and debate around those issues: Internet Governance Forum (IGF)
  o The IGF seems to have set in motion a process of institutional isomorphism, with multiple national and regional Internet governance forums following in its wake. The dialogue and writing about the appropriate definition of Internet governance was not entirely settled by WSIS but continues to this day
   Another issue is that governance in cyberspace is so distributed and indirect that it is often unclear where authority to govern lies.
  o One key area of development was Internet content regulation—that is, blocking and filtering.
   As nation-states gradually learned how to filter and block websites from outside their jurisdiction as an attempt to maintain sovereign control of information—and users and external actors explored ways to circumvent those barriers—an important empirical body of literature grew up around efforts by scholars to track and understand these practices.
  o A school of research focused on the economics of information security also developed during this period.
   The new field was based on the insight that the Internet’s security problems are not simply technical but are driven by the economic incentives of actors and firms.
  o Intermediary liability had been considered an Internet governance issue since the earliest days of the commercial Internet, but increased with the growing profitability of Internet intermediaries.
   The rise of online market intermediaries (e.g., eBay and Amazon), search engines such as Google, and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter brought to the fore new policy issues around topics such as defamation, copyright and counterfeit goods, and e-commerce.
  o The tension between the Internet’s capacity to quickly and easily share digital content, on the one hand, and the protection of copyright and trademarks, on the other, provided one of the major flashpoints of policy conflict and research
   Incumbent copyright holders became some of the strongest advocates for imposing policing, but the rise of the internet also sparked a new social movement that pushed for access to knowledge (A2K).

Question 19

Explain Phase Four of Internet Governance (Mueller)

Answer 19

• Phase Four (2010-): Surveillance, Securitization, and Alignment
  o In the fourth phase, ongoing as we write, issues of surveillance, privacy, and cybersecurity have become increasingly central to Internet governance politics and research.
   The Internet is going through a process of securitization, which further reinforces the linkages between the nation-state and Internet governance
  o Internet governance research now overlaps with studies of war and interstate conflict, deterrence, foreign policy, espionage, terrorist groups, and the threat to critical infrastructures that might be posed through cyberspace vulnerabilities.
  o The Edward Snowden revelations, which exposed internal documents about the pervasive global surveillance of the US National Security Agency, were a watershed in this process.
   The resurfaced debates also solidified the link between military and national security and the Internet:
• It reinforced notions that one government, the United States, was preeminent or hegemonic in cyberspace
• It opened the veil on how the United States leveraged the extensive data collection that its private intermediaries gather about their users.
• It undermined US moral authority in Internet rights and norms.
   The Snowden revelations contributed to a major institutional change in Internet governance namely, the IANA transition
• US control of ICANN via the IANA functions contract had been controversial since the early days of WSIS
  o The post-Snowden crisis of legitimacy finally prompted the United States to relinquish its control of the DNS root and its contractual control of the IANA functions, owing to fears that many countries would defect from the ICANN-led Internet governance regime.
  o Surveillance and privacy were also key factors in the civilian debate over policy responses to the ubiquity of social media Surveillance and privacy were also key factors in the civilian debate over policy responses to the ubiquity of social media
   Data-localization laws were also analyzed as a digital trade issue.
  o Another recent development in the field of Internet governance and trade is tech nationalism.
• Conclusion
  o Internet governance as a label and field of study has undergone a remarkable evolution over the last 20 years
   Once a term applied narrowly to debates around the control of the DNS root—and hotly contested and rejected as a label even then—it has now become an accepted designator for a broad range of policy issues, institutional developments, and geopolitical phenomena
  o The field of law has shown the most consistent and sustained interest in Internet governance as a topic. Since 2010, however, political science and international relations publications have dominated the field in terms of the sheer number of publications
   We attribute this to the rise of cybersecurity as a policy and research preoccupation and the growing perception of Internet governance as a geopolitical issue.
  o As the Internet and connected devices become ubiquitous (Internet of Things), it is possible that most of the governance questions will be confronted and resolved in sector-specific ways that fall outside the realm of Internet governance
   If this happens, ironically, it may be that the definition and scope of Internet governance once again reverts to the narrow realm of the Internet’s naming, addressing, and routing infrastructure

Question 20

What is TPB?

Answer 20

The theory of planned behavior (TPB) is a general framework for predicting and explaining human behavior across various domains and contexts.

Question 21

What does TPB propose?

Answer 21

TPB proposes that behavior is determined by three factors: attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control. These factors influence the intention to perform the behavior, which is the most proximal predictor of behavior.

Question 22

What is Ifinedo (2012) about?

Answer 22

The article investigates information systems security policy (ISSP) compliance by integrating the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the protection motivation theory (PMT).

The article proposes and tests a research model that includes factors such as self-efficacy, attitude, subjective norm, response efficacy, perceived vulnerability, perceived severity, and response cost as predictors of ISSP compliance intention.

The article uses a survey of 124 business managers and IS professionals to validate the research model and hypotheses using partial least squares (PLS) technique.

The article finds that self-efficacy, attitude, subjective norm, response efficacy, and perceived vulnerability have significant positive effects on ISSP compliance intention, while perceived severity and response cost have no significant effects.