The Internet is now a key part of everyday life across the developed world, and growing rapidly across developing countries. This Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the latest research on Internet governance, written by the leading scholars in the field. With an international focus, it features contributions from lawyers, economists and political scientists across North America, Europe and Australia. They adopt a broad multidisciplinary perspective, taking in law, economics, political science, international relations, and communications studies. Thought-provoking chapters cover topics such as ICANN, the Internet Governance Forum, grassroots activism, innovation, human rights, privacy in social networks, and network neutrality. Being a forward-looking guide for the next decade, this Research Handbook will strongly appeal to scholars and graduate students in the social sciences studying and researching Internet governance, political scientists, economists, lawyers and computer scientists working on governance issues, as well as regulators and policymakers responsible for Internet governance in national governments and intergovernmental organisations.

E-government is an increasingly well-established and wide-ranging field, in which there has been an explosion of new technologies, applications, and data resulting in new challenges and opportunities for e-government research and practice. This Research Handbook advances research in the field of e-government by first recognizing its roots and documenting its growth and progress. It investigates the advent and implications of new technologies, and structures the content around core topics of service, management, engagement and access. Two additional sections examine the role of e-government in developing countries and smart cities.

This fresh and insightful Research Handbook delivers global perspectives on information law and governance, delving into principles of information law in the areas of trade secrecy, privacy, data protection and cybersecurity.

The steady growth of internet commerce over the past twenty years has given rise to a host of new legal issues in a broad range of fields. This authoritative Research Handbook comprises chapters by leading scholars which will provide a solid foundation for newcomers to the subject and also offer exciting new insights that will further the understanding of e-commerce experts. Key topics covered include: contracting, payments, intellectual property, extraterritorial enforcement, alternative dispute resolution, social media, consumer protection, network neutrality, online gambling, domain name governance, and privacy.

The Internet is connecting an increasing number of individuals, organizations, and devices into global networks of information flows. It is accelerating the dynamics of innovation in the digital economy, affecting the nature and intensity of competition, and enabling private companies, governments, and the non-profit sector to develop new business models. In this new ecosystem many of the theoretical assumptions and historical observations upon which economics rests are altered and need critical reassessment.

In recent years, we have witnessed the mushrooming of pro- democracy and protest movements not only in the Arab world, but also within Europe and the Americas. Such movements have ranged from popular upheavals, like in Tunisia and Egypt, to the organization of large-scale demonstrations against unpopular policies, as in Spain, Greece and Poland. What connects these different events are not only their democratic aspirations, but also their innovative forms of communication and organization through online means, which are sometimes considered to be outside of the State’s control. At the same time, however, it has become more and more apparent that countries are attempting to increase their understanding of, and control over, their citizens’ actions in the digital sphere. This involves striving to develop surveillance instruments, control mechanisms and processes engineered to dominate the digital public sphere, which necessitates the assistance and support of private actors such as Internet intermediaries. Examples include the growing use of Internet surveillance technology with which online data traffic is analysed, and the extensive monitoring of social networks. Despite increased media attention, academic debate on the ambivalence of these technologies, mechanisms and techniques remains relatively limited, as is discussion of the involvement of corporate actors. The purpose of this edited volume is to reflect on how Internet-related technologies, mechanisms and techniques may be used as a means to enable expression, but also to restrict speech, manipulate public debate and govern global populaces. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Information Technology and Politics.

The case for a smarter “prosumer law” approach to Internet regulation that would better protect online innovation, public safety, and fundamental democratic rights. Internet use has become ubiquitous in the past two decades, but governments, legislators, and their regulatory agencies have struggled to keep up with the rapidly changing Internet technologies and uses. In this groundbreaking collaboration, regulatory lawyer Christopher Marsden and computer scientist Ian Brown analyze the regulatory shaping of “code”—the technological environment of the Internet—to achieve more economically efficient and socially just regulation. They examine five “hard cases” that illustrate the regulatory crisis: privacy and data protection; copyright and creativity incentives; censorship; social networks and user-generated content; and net neutrality. The authors describe the increasing “multistakeholderization” of Internet governance, in which user groups argue for representation in the closed business-government dialogue, seeking to bring in both rights-based and technologically expert perspectives. Brown and Marsden draw out lessons for better future regulation from the regulatory and interoperability failures illustrated by the five cases. They conclude that governments, users, and better functioning markets need a smarter “prosumer law” approach. Prosumer law would be designed to enhance the competitive production of public goods, including innovation, public safety, and fundamental democratic rights.

This comprehensive and innovative Research Handbook tackles the pressing issues confronting us at the dawn of the global network society, including freedom of speech, government transparency and the digital divide. Engaging with controversial problems of public policy including freedom of expression, copyright and information inequality, the Research Handbook on Information Policy offers a well-rounded exploration of the history and future of this vital field.

The book addresses representation of the public interest in Internet standard developing organisations (SDOs). Much of the existing literature on Internet governance focuses on international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The literature covering standard developing organisations has to date focused on organisational aspects. This book breaks new ground with investigation of standard development within SDO fora. Case studies centre on standards relating to privacy and security, mobile communications, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and copyright. The book lifts the lid on internet standard setting with detailed insight into a world which, although highly technical, very much affects the way in which citizens live and work on a daily basis. In doing this it adds significantly to the trajectory of research on Internet standards and SDOs that explore the relationship between politics and protocols. The analysis contributes to academic debates on democracy and the internet, global self-regulation and civil society, and international decision-making processes in unstructured environments. The book advances work on the Multiple Streams Framework (MS) by applying it to decision-making in non-state environments, namely SDOs which have long been dominated by private actors. The book is aimed at academic audiences in political science, computer science communications and science and technology studies as well as representatives from civil society, the civil service, government, engineers and experts working within SDO fora. It will also be accessible to students at the postgraduate and undergraduate levels.

The principles of freedom of expression have been developed over centuries. How are they reserved and passed on? How can large internet gatekeepers be required to respect freedom of expression and to contribute actively to a diverse and plural marketplace of ideas? These are key issues for media regulation, and will remain so for the foreseeable decades. The book starts with the foundations of freedom of expression and freedom of the press, and then goes on to explore the general issues concerning the regulation of the internet as a specific medium. It then turns to analysing the legal issues relating to the three most important gatekeepers whose operations directly affect freedom of expression: ISPs, search engines and social media platforms. Finally it summarises the potential future regulatory and media policy directions. The book takes a comparative legal approach, focusing primarily on English and American regulations, case law and jurisprudential debates, but it also details the relevant international developments (Council of Europe, European Union) as well as the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights.