Sandra Braman: Change of State: Information, Policy, and Power (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · copyright, data, governance, information policy, internet governance, law, politics, power, technology
As the informational state replaces the bureaucratic welfare state, control over information creation, processing, flows, and use has become the most effective form of power. In Change of State Sandra Braman examines the theoretical and practical ramifications of this “change of state.” She looks at the ways in which governments are deliberate, explicit, and consistent in their use of information policy to exercise power, exploring not only such familiar topics as intellectual property rights and privacy but also areas in which policy is highly effective but little understood. Such lesser-known issues include hybrid citizenship, the use of “functionally equivalent borders” internally to allow exceptions to U.S. law, research funding, census methods, and network interconnection. Trends in information policy, argues Braman, both manifest and trigger change in the nature of governance itself.
After laying the theoretical, conceptual, and historical foundations for understanding the informational state, Braman examines 20 information policy principles found in the U.S Constitution. She then explores the effects of U.S. information policy on the identity, structure, borders, and change processes of the state itself and on the individuals, communities, and organizations that make up the state. Looking across the breadth of the legal system, she presents current law as well as trends in and consequences of several information policy issues in each category affected.
Change of State introduces information policy on two levels, coupling discussions of specific contemporary problems with more abstract analysis drawing on social theory and empirical research as well as law. Most important, the book provides a way of understanding how information policy brings about the fundamental social changes that come with the transformation to the informational state.
Publisher MIT Press, 2006
ISBN 0262025973, 9780262025973
545 pages
Berin Szoka, Adam Marcus (eds.): The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · facebook, free speech, google, intellectual property, internet, internet filtering, internet governance, iphone, law, liberation technologies, net neutrality, reputation, search, youtube
This unique book brings together 26 thought leaders on Internet law, philosophy, policy and economics to consider, from a wide variety of perspectives, what the next digital decade might bring for the Internet. This book is essential reading for anyone gazing toward the digital future.
The book’s 31 essays address questions such as: Has the Internet been good for our culture? Is the Internet at risk from the drive to build more secure, but less “open” systems and devices? Is the Internet really so “exceptional?” Has it fundamentally changed economics? Who—and what ideas—will govern the Net in 2020? Should online intermediaries like access providers, hosting providers, search engines and social networks do more to “police” their networks, increase transparency, or operate “neutrally?” What future is there for privacy online? Can online free speech be regulated? Can it really unseat tyrants?
With contributions by Robert D. Atkinson, Stewart Baker, Ann Bartow, Yochai Benkler, Larry Downes, Josh Goldfoot, Eric Goldman, James Grimmelmann, H. Brian Holland, David R. Johnson, Andrew Keen, Hon. Alex Kozinski, Mark MacCarthy, Geoffrey Manne, Evgeny Morozov, Milton Mueller, John Palfrey, Frank Pasquale, Berin Szoka, Paul Szynol, Adam Thierer, Hal Varian, Christopher Wolf, Tim Wu, Michael Zimmer, Jonathan Zittrain, Ethan Zuckerman.
Publisher TechFreedom, Washington DC, 2010
ISBN 1435767861, 9781435767867
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 Unported License
575 pages
authors
publisher
google books
Laura DeNardis: Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · arpanet, intellectual property, internet, internet governance, open standards, politics, technology
The Internet has reached a critical point. The world is running out of Internet addresses. There is a finite supply of approximately 4.3 billion Internet Protocol (IP) addresses—the unique binary numbers required for every exchange of information over the Internet—within the Internet’s prevailing technical architecture (IPv4). In the 1990s the Internet standards community identified the potential depletion of these addresses as a crucial design concern and selected a new protocol (IPv6) that would expand the number of Internet addresses exponentially—to 340 undecillion addresses. Despite a decade of predictions about imminent global conversion, IPv6 adoption has barely begun. IPv6 is not backward compatible with IPv4, and the ultimate success of IPv6 depends on a critical mass of IPv6 deployment, even among users who don’t need it, or on technical workarounds that could in turn create a new set of concerns.
Protocol Politics examines what’s at stake politically, economically, and technically in the selection and adoption of a new Internet protocol. Laura DeNardis’s key insight is that protocols are political. IPv6 serves as a case study for how protocols more generally are intertwined with socioeconomic and political order. IPv6 intersects with provocative topics including Internet civil liberties, U.S. military objectives, globalization, institutional power struggles, and the promise of global democratic freedoms. DeNardis offers recommendations for Internet standards governance, based not only on technical concerns but on principles of openness and transparency, and examines the global implications of looming Internet address scarcity versus the slow deployment of the new protocol designed to solve this problem.
Publisher MIT Press, 2009
Information Revolution and Global Politics series
ISBN 0262042576, 9780262042574
270 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-22)
Comment (1)