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Towards a Theory of Information Control: Content Regulation, Disciplinary Capacity and the Governance on the Internet

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Global Free Expression - Governing the Boundaries of Internet Content

Part of the book series: Law, Governance and Technology Series ((LGTS,volume 28))

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Abstract

Questions of Internet regulation and governance are enormously laden with normative presumptions. This is particularly the case in regard to Freedom of Expression and its restriction that is typically termed ‘censorship.’ This chapter proposes a theoretical model of information control based on (a) communities of practice, (b) governance through architecture and (c) network gatekeeping to assist in understanding how the boundaries of Internet expression are defined. It argues that communities of practice regulate speech according to their own logics of appropriateness.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    From here onwards ‘community of practice’ and ‘professional community’ will be used interchangeably.

  2. 2.

    I have had the great pleasure to discuss many of these criticisms with the author, Emanuel Adler, during his sabbatical at the EUI. As such this critique reflects not only published work but also personal discussions and forthcoming publications, which I believe will respond to many of these issues more directly.

  3. 3.

    While I initially began thinking about this phenomenon in Hyderabad in 2008 when participants of the Internet Governance Forum ooohed and aaahed to the voice of Robert Kahn – one of the inventors of the TCP/IP protocol together with Vint Cerf – that I fully understood the importance of this concept.

  4. 4.

    I am grateful to Donatella della Porta for first suggesting this term as a way of conceptualising the role of CRAs.

  5. 5.

    Of course it should be noted here that this distinction does not suggest that ‘public’ and ‘private’ actors are discrete and fully independent categories. Indeed as will become evident in the following analysis both are mutually dependent and deeply intertwined. For a further discussion of this issue see Migdal, J. S. (2001). State in society: studying how states and societies transform and constitute one another. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

  6. 6.

    I am grateful to Thorsten Benner for proposing this term to describe the issues discussed here.

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  1. Centre for Internet & Human Rights, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt, Brandenburg, Germany

    Ben Wagner

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Wagner, B. (2016). Towards a Theory of Information Control: Content Regulation, Disciplinary Capacity and the Governance on the Internet. In: Global Free Expression - Governing the Boundaries of Internet Content. Law, Governance and Technology Series, vol 28. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33513-1_2

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