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Recently, development scholars have begun to study the platform economy. In Latin America, platformisation has resulted in the widespread reorganisation of business practices across many sectors, with important implications for incumbent industries, labour and social processes. These changes raise questions about the potential contributions of platformisation to national economic health and social welfare. This paper argues that the link between platformisation and development can be studied from a developmental state point of view. Specifically, in Latin America, the disruptions caused by platform innovations create policy windows that could result in platform developmental policy innovations, however, developmental policy-making is constrained by the structural characteristics of Latin American economies. Taking this into consideration, the paper positions Biber et al.’s (2017) model of policy disruption, and Fairfield’s (2015) model of policy influence as tools to critically assess platform policymaking from a developmentalist point of view. This approach is illustrated through a survey and discussion of policy disruptions caused by platformisation in the transportation, lodging and fintech sectors of Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. The discussion surfaces specific challenges for platform developmentalism related to policy autonomy and capture, societal mobilisation of data and other resources, and state-market collaborations. The paper concludes by positioning the ‘platform society’ as a normative goal and offers an agenda to advance it through comparative research of platform policymaking.

Content moderation has exploded as a policy, advocacy, and public concern. But these debates still tend to be driven by high-profile incidents and to focus on the largest, US based platforms. In order to contribute to informed policymaking, scholarship in this area needs to recognise that moderation is an expansive socio-technical phenomenon, which functions in many contexts and takes many forms. Expanding the discussion also changes how we assess the array of proposed policy solutions meant to improve content moderation. Here, nine content moderation scholars working in critical internet studies propose how to expand research on content moderation, with implications for policy.

This paper studies the efficacy of the Reddit’s quarantine, increasingly implemented in the platform as a means of restricting and reducing misogynistic and other hateful material. Using the case studies of r/TheRedPill and r/Braincels, the paper argues the quarantine successfully cordoned off affected subreddits and associated hateful material from the rest of the platform. It did not, however, reduce the levels of hateful material within the affected spaces. Instead many users reacted by leaving Reddit for less regulated spaces, with Reddit making this hateful material someone else’s problem. The paper argues therefore that the success of the quarantine as a policy response is mixed.

This article examines developments regarding encryption law and policy within ‘Five Eyes’ (FVEY) countries by focussing on the recently enacted Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018 (Cth) in Australia. The legislation is significant both domestically and internationally because of its extraterritorial reach, allowing the development of new ways for Australian law enforcement and security agencies to access encrypted telecommunications via transnational designated communications providers, and allowing for Australian authorities to assist foreign counterparts in both enforcing and potentially circumventing their domestic laws. We argue that Australia is the ‘weak link’ in the FVEY alliance as - unlike other FVEY members - has no comprehensive enforceable human rights protections. Given this, there is a possibility for regulatory arbitrage in exploiting these new surveillance powers to undermine encryption via Australia.

We examine and compare data and privacy governance by four China-based mobile applications and their international versions: Baidu, Toutiao and its international version TopBuzz, Douyin and its international version TikTok, and WeChat. Together, these four applications represent popular Chinese apps branching into diverse overseas markets such as Europe, Brazil, North America, and Southeast Asia. We first present an overview of the ownership, functions, business models and strategies of the reviewed apps. To study the app's interface design, we employ the walkthrough method to examine privacy features during the account registration and deletion stages in app usage. Lastly, we conducted content analysis of the terms of service and privacy policies to establish the app's data collection, storage, transfer, use, and disclosure measures. Our analysis showed variations across apps and within the Chinese and international-facing versions in their data and privacy governance in app design and policies. Baidu has the most unsatisfactory data and privacy protection measures, while ByteDance's TikTok/Douyin and TopBuzz/Toutiao offer more comprehensive user protection from different jurisdictions. Moreover, this paper highlights the role of platform owners (e.g., Google and Apple) in gatekeeping mobile app privacy standards and the role of the state in imposing a data protection framework on overseas versions of China-based mobile apps.

The aim of this article is to examine some of the emerging challenges associated with digital youth inclusion and the asymmetric power dynamics between those who collect data and those who are the targets of the data collection process - commonly referred to as the ‘big data divide’. Digital inclusion is understood here as a strategy to ensure that all people have equal opportunities and appropriate skills to access and benefit from digital technologies. Digital inclusion practice encompasses a range of methods and approaches used to help individuals and communities to access and understand digital technologies. While the literature analysis is framed within a wider, international context, the discussion is primarily situated within Scotland’s studies. The analysis presented here reveals that many existing youth digital inclusion programmes are corporate-led and primarily focus on functional digital literacy (e.g., how to access information online), and not critical digital literacy (e.g., how to critically analyse the information online). I argue here that digital inclusion should not solely be viewed as a strategy for employment and education, but as a set of larger, systematic, continually evolving, and critical youth engagement practice. In the era of the ‘big data divide’, digital inclusion programmes should aim to enable young people’s critical digital abilities to continually review and respond to their positions within the power structures of the data society. To achieve this, I propose three areas for consideration for youth digital inclusion practice.

This conceptual paper addresses the issues of transparency as linked to artificial intelligence (AI) from socio-legal and computer scientific perspectives. Firstly, we discuss the conceptual distinction between transparency in AI and algorithmic transparency, and argue for the wider concept ‘in AI’, as a partly contested albeit useful notion in relation to transparency. Secondly, we show that transparency as a general concept is multifaceted, and of widespread theoretical use in multiple disciplines over time, particularly since the 1990s. Still, it has had a resurgence in contemporary notions of AI governance, such as in the multitude of recently published ethics guidelines on AI. Thirdly, we discuss and show the relevance of the fact that transparency expresses a conceptual metaphor of more general significance, linked to knowing, bringing positive connotations that may have normative effects to regulatory debates. Finally, we draw a possible categorisation of aspects related to transparency in AI, or what we interchangeably call AI transparency, and argue for the need of developing a multidisciplinary understanding, in order to contribute to the governance of AI as applied on markets and in society.

Facial-recognition software continues to create heated controversy, as illustrated by a year-long pilot run at the Berlin-Südkreuz train station. The test run at one of Berlin’s main arteries was a catalyst for media attention, spurring heated discourse on the efficiency and legitimacy of surveillance technology. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis and (post-)panoptic theory, this paper investigates how the relationship between the public and the state is represented, how automated surveillance technology is linguistically framed and which problematisations were associated with the technology deployed during the 2017 pilot.

The title of this piece is a somewhat heavy-handed word play. The property market I’m writing about is the market in intellectual property, which is broken in so many ways, evidenced by the existence of patent mountains and patent trolls, fighting over how many angles they can fit in the 360 degrees around the head of a pin, rather than actually innovating. (It is well known in creative tech circles that pausing to talk to the IP lawyers would never have led to the discovery of the internet protocol). The emergent property I’m referring to is the possibility that such a complex system could fairly suddenly exhibit some new behaviour. In this article, I speculate that this new behaviour could just be that the idea of property ceases to exist. The article is written somewhat derivatively after the 1960s science fiction style of writers such as Cyril Kornbluth, JG Ballard, and John Brunner. Any resemblance to their very creative output is entirely good luck rather than actual skill.

The essay is written in the form of a magazine article published in 2039 – eleven years after the introduction of NeoTouch, a technology facilitating digital touch as human-to-human communication based on a brain-computer interface (BCI). The article follows Barbara, a young woman who recently had the technology deactivated, so as to understand the social and physical consequences of the device. Through the introduction of different voices the narrative integrates the history of the technology, the ethical, social and legal contexts and various personal accounts.

It is 2038. In our data-driven future, data has been firmly established as an economic asset and new, data-driven smart technologies have changed the way we live, work, love, think and vote. However, privacy laws provide a powerful counterbalance against data usage, stifling innovation. Joanne Asschenberg, a young entrepreneur, finds out the hard way when she introduces her AI personal assistant. While the law is clear, the private GDPR enforcement boards have in practice made use of AI impossible. She has to find a creative solution within the law or risk losing the AI completely...

This story is inspired by the growing feasibility of Decentralised Autonomous Corporations (DACs), operating by means of distributed blockchain technologies. The story is set in the near future where a decentralised corporation – powered by machine-learning algorithms and fed on an unending stream of data – has entirely penetrated the fabric of society. Ultimately, however, it is the narcissism of humans – their insatiable need to be recognised in some way – that drives the exponential power of the corporation. Some of the themes that emerge from the story are: 1) the production of social media content, 2) the dangers of corporate personhood, 3) the nature of human and non-human agency, 4) the nature of truth in the context of the information age, and 5) the potential impact of fully autonomous technologies.

This paper presents two case studies of Facebook's rapid changes relating to international electoral politics: the "I'm a Voter" affordance and the platform's data and targeting capabilities. The article shows how Facebook changed with respect to its policies, procedures, and affordances, especially given the normative pressure exerted by journalists. Drawing from these case studies, we conceptualise continual and rapid change as "platform transience" and argue that it often arises from external pressure and economic considerations. Platform transience has significant implications for the ability of stakeholders to hold platforms accountable, raises significant issues for electoral fairness, and increases the potential for unequal political information environments.

The use of big data in political campaigns extends far beyond micro-targeting, and has been singled out by journalists and campaign staffers alike as a powerful force that is integral to electoral victory. Current scholarship on the subject remains more mixed, however. This article provides an overview of what we know (and don’t yet know) about the effects of data-campaigning across various goals of political campaigns, alongside more public facing narratives that present data campaigning as an all-powerful tactic, highlighting the gap between these two views.

Researchers in psychology have long known that preferences are constructed in the decision-making process, influenced by choice environments that trigger unconscious biases and heuristics. As a result, choices, including those of voters, can be manipulated by political information. Personalised political messages, designed to influence based on detailed personal profiles, can undermine voter autonomy. We suggest that these practices should therefore be regulated, and discuss policy options and approaches, specifically the appropriate balance between freedom of political speech and privacy rights and interests, the implications of voter analytics for the electoral process, and how and by whom sophisticated voter analytics practices should be regulated.

Data-driven campaigning has become a feature of political campaigns around the world. There is growing evidence that political campaigners at the elite and grassroots level believe that data matters for electoral success. This belief is having important consequences for the way that political campaigns are being performed. However, in practice, data-driven campaigning does not take a single form and there are very different practices in the way data is being used. These variations matter because they have different democratic implications. Whilst some uses of data may be viewed as permissible, others can raise democratic concerns. This article casts light on a diversity of different data-driven practices evident in campaigns by offering a theoretical account of the different ways in which data can be used. Discussing three factors that characterise the activities of political campaigners, this article demonstrates variations in who is using data in campaigns, what the sources of campaign data are, and how data informs communication. Reviewing the landscape of data-driven campaigning within political parties, and drawing extensive analysis of the UK case, this article presents categories that can be used to map campaign practice and identify activities to which regulators may wish to respond.

This article contextualises, defines, and operationalises the concept of platformisation. Drawing insights from different scholarly perspectives on platforms—software studies, critical political economy, business studies, and cultural studies—it develops a comprehensive approach to this process. Platformisation is defined as the penetration of infrastructures, economic processes and governmental frameworks of digital platforms in different economic sectors and spheres of life, as well as the reorganisation of cultural practices and imaginations around these platforms. Using app stores as an example, we show how this definition can be employed in research.

Datafication is not just the making of information, which, in one sense, human beings have been doing since the creation of symbols and writing. Rather, datafication is a contemporary phenomenon which refers to the quantification of human life through digital information, very often for economic value. This process has major social consequences. Disciplines such as political economy, critical data studies, software studies, legal theory, and—more recently— decolonial theory, have considered different aspects of those consequences to be important. Fundamental to all such approaches is the analysis of the intersection of power and knowledge.

This paper discusses the new phenomenon of platform ad archives. Over the past year, leading social media platforms have installed publicly accessible databases documenting their political advertisements, and several countries have moved to regulate them. If designed and implemented properly, ad archives can correct for structural informational asymmetries in the online advertising industry, and thereby improve accountability through litigation and through publicity. However, present implementations leave much to be desired. We discuss key criticisms, suggest several improvements and identify areas for future research and debate. ispartof: Internet Policy Review vol:8 issue:4 pages:1-21 status: Published online

Since 2016, when the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal began to emerge, public concern has grown around the threat of “online manipulation”. While these worries are familiar to privacy researchers, this paper aims to make them more salient to policymakers—first, by defining “online manipulation”, thus enabling identification of manipulative practices; and second, by drawing attention to the specific harms online manipulation threatens. We argue that online manipulation is the use of information technology to covertly influence another person’s decision-making, by targeting and exploiting their decision-making vulnerabilities. Engaging in such practices can harm individuals by diminishing their economic interests, but its deeper, more insidious harm is its challenge to individual autonomy. We explore this autonomy harm, emphasising its implications for both individuals and society, and we briefly outline some strategies for combating online manipulation and strengthening autonomy in an increasingly digital world.

The March 2017 advertiser revolt on YouTube, popularly known as the adpocalypse, introduced widespread and radical changes on the platform’s policies related to the moderation of content, their ‘monetisability’ and the terms of the relationship between creators and the platform. These changes in turn have caused significant discontent within the creator community while also gradually transforming the predominant nature of content on the platform. This essay analyses this controversy that is yet to be subjected to a scholarly investigation, in order to probe the ways in which algorithmic moderation of content affects their monetisability and consequently the viewership patterns of culture. Through closely studying the new regime of content moderation and analysing user testimonies in the aftermath of the ‘Adpocalypse’, this essay poses critical questions about the public utility like role of digital platforms whose gatekeeping function remains largely outside the purview of public debate and deliberation.

This article offers an analytical investigation of the different actors and forces that mould definitions of "data ethics" in European policy-making. It details how data ethics public policy initiatives took shape in the context of the European General Data Protection reform, and addresses the general uncertainty that exists regarding their role and function. The paper also presents an analytical framework for an action-oriented "data ethics of power" that aims to elucidate the power relations of the 'Big Data Society', arguing that we recognise data ethics policy initiatives as open-ended spaces of negotiation among different interest groups that seek to guide the cultural definition of "data ethics", with complex power relations exercised via cultural positioning.

Across the globe, net neutrality policy consultations have sought the input of an engaged networked public by recursively mobilising the very technology of the internet itself as a kind of policy participation. This paper examines such cases, where regulators in the United States, Canada, India, and the European Union intended to more accurately represent public interest perspectives. However, as I argue, appeals to the participatory culture of the internet risk reifying participation itself while ignoring systemic inequalities that structure the concept of networked publics according to the exclusionary norms of internet discourse.

The debate about how to govern personal data has intensified in recent years. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which came into effect in May 2018, relies on transparency mechanisms codified through obligations for organisations and citizen rights. While some of these rights have existed for decades, their effectiveness is rarely tested in practice. This paper reports on the exercise of the so-called right of access, which gives citizens the right to get access to their personal data. We study this by working with participants—citizens for whom the law is written—who collectively sent over a hundred data access requests and shared the responses with us. We analyse the replies to the access requests, as well as the participant's evaluation of them. We find that non-compliance with the law's obligations is widespread. Participants were critical of many responses, though they also reported a large variation in quality. They did not find them effective for getting transparency into the processing of their own personal data. We did find a way forward emerging from their responses, namely by looking at the requests as a collective endeavour, rather than an individual one. Comparing the responses to similar access requests creates a context to judge the quality of a reply and the lawfulness of the data practices it reveals. Moreover, collective use of the right of access can help shift the power imbalance between individual citizens and organisations in favour of the citizen, which may incentivise organisations to deal with data in a more transparent way.

Since being first developed through the case law of the European Court of Justice, the Right to be Forgotten (RTBF) has continued rapidly to evolve and has recently moved beyond its European borders. In recent times, RTBF has faced increasing debate and litigation, such as in Latin America. This paper focuses on the wide spectrum of interpretations RTBF has garnered across countries and data protection authorities. This paper compares relevant European or Latin American cases within each jurisdiction on the basis of four key variables. Case analysis showed that there is no unified approach to RTBF. This is especially true at the level of the defendants involved, that is, whether it involved the local subsidiary or the parent company, and whether the order of removal had local or 'global' effects, meaning the removal of content or access was addressed to a local or global domain. This last issue is paramount, since it will determine whether an order of removal would leave content available and accessible for anyone outside of the jurisdiction of the authority who orders it, or whether links to the content become inaccessible to everyone everywhere.

The present article argues that the fact that personal data holds great value, in combination with a lack of transparency in its commercial use, leads to a need for consumer policy that strengthens consumer protection. The widespread practice of user agreements and consent-based regulation of personal data collection is not satisfactory for balancing these information-asymmetric markets. The lack of transparency deriving from the complex and massive datafication of consumers – where consumers are profiled, data is brokered and the algorithmically automated decision-making is opaque – speaks to the need for improved supervision at a more structural level above and beyond the individual consumer's choices, preferably by more active consumer protection authorities.

The need for online platform regulation has been a topic of scholarly debate. However, reality is now catching up to and even overtaking the academic writing on this subject. France has adopted a law on platform fairness, the European Commission recently ordered Google to implement a form of search neutrality, and more regulatory initiatives are on the horizon. That is why we have to look beyond the question whether online platforms should be regulated. As actual regulation supplants the scholarly debate, we must also examine how they are being regulated. This article distils from the various proposals at EU and member state level a set of operational principles that can serve as a frame of reference for productive debate on platform regulation. ispartof: Internet Policy Review vol:2018 issue:1 pages:1-19 status: published

During the past three decades there has been a persistent, and dark, narrative about political micro-targeting. But while it might seem that the micro-targeting practices of campaigns have massive, and un-democratic, electoral effects, decades of work in political communication should give us pause. What explains the outsized concerns about micro-targeting in the face of the generally thin evidence of its widespread and pernicious effects? This essay argues that we have anxieties about micro-targeting because we have anxieties about democracy itself. Or, to put it differently, that scholars often hold up an idealised vision of democracy as the standard upon which to judge all political communication.

Political micro-targeting (PMT) has become a popular topic both in academia and in the public discussions after the surprise results of the 2016 US presidential election, the UK vote on leaving the European Union, and a number of general elections in Europe in 2017. Yet, we still know little about whether PMT is a tool with such destructive potential that it requires close societal control, or if it’s “just” a new phenomenon with currently unknown capacities, but which can ultimately be incorporated into our political processes. In this article we identify the points where we think we need to further develop our analytical capacities around PMT. We argue that we need to decouple research from the US context, and through more non-US and comparative research we need to develop a better understanding of the macro, meso, and micro level factors that affect the adoption and success of PMTs across different countries. One of the most under-researched macro-level factors is law. We argue that PMT research must develop a better understanding of law, especially in Europe, where the regulatory frameworks around platforms, personal data, political and commercial speech do shape the use and effectiveness of PMT. We point out that the incorporation of such new factors calls for the sophistication of research designs, which currently rely too much on qualitative methods, and use too little of the data that exists on PMT. And finally, we call for distancing PMT research from the hype surrounding the new PMT capabilities, and the moral panics that quickly develop around its uses.

This study explores the persuasion techniques used by the Israeli Digital Rights Movement in its campaign against Israel’s biometric database. The research was based on analysing the movement's official publications and announcements and the journalistic discourse that surrounded their campaign within the political, judicial, and public arenas in 2009-2017. The results demonstrate how the organisation navigated three persuasion frames to achieve its goals: the unnecessity of a biometric database in democracy; the database’s ineffectiveness; and governmental incompetence in securing it. I conclude by discussing how analysing civil society privacy campaigns can shed light over different regimes of privacy governance.

In 2007, Australia’s Commonwealth Government took a dramatic new approach to the governance of remote Indigenous communities. The ‘Northern Territory Intervention’ aimed to combat abuse and violence in remote Indigenous communities, and included far-reaching changes to welfare administration, employment programmes and policing. This paper considers a hitherto obscure aspect of the Intervention: the surveillance of publicly funded computers and internet use. Between 2007 and 2012, providers of internet and computer access facilities in the affected communities were required to audit and record computer use. In this paper we examine the legal and policy dimensions of this case of governmental surveillance, using interviews, published materials and documents obtained through freedom of information processes.

The paper examines the recent Free Basics controversy in India, which triggered a national level policy debate on the appropriate regulatory response to differential pricing of data services, employing the theoretical framework of 'ideology in practice'. Unpacking 'openness' in design, 'inclusion' in provisioning and 'empowerment' in use as contested concepts in the policy process, the paper demonstrates a paradoxical conflation of oppositional interpretations of access. Tracing the material-discursive practices of actors in the debate and scrutinising everyday practices of the internet for their moral claims, the paper examines if and how hegemonic discourses of economic globalisation are challenged, and alternative meanings of the internet etched in contemporary political agenda on internet governance in India.

The surveillance disclosures triggered by Snowden have fueled the public re- negotiation of privacy. To follow resulting controversies we present a methodology that links social worlds theory to approaches asking for the democratic governance character of issue- centred arenas. After having outlined this approach it is put to the test. We analyse and compare two cases: the Schengen/National Routing, and the Parliamentary Committee investigating the NSA surveillance disclosures. The analysis reveals two oscillating governance modes at work in the privacy arena; their interplay results in an obstruction. Based on this observation we finally provide a diagnosis of possible future arena trajectories.&nbsp

In popular culture, and in policy discussions, the internet is often conceived of as a decentralised technology, which cannot be controlled. Drawing from research into internet infrastructure, focusing on the Border Gateway Protocol, I show that the internet has never been, and never can be, decentralised. I argue that the internet is better viewed as being distributed, both in terms of technologies and governance arrangements. The shift in perspective, from decentralised to distributed, is essential to understand the past and present internet, and to imagine possible future internets which preserve and support the public good.

Facing general conceptions of the power effects of big data, this thematic edition is interested in studies that scrutinise big data and power in concrete fields of application. It brings together scholars from different disciplines who analyse the fields agriculture, education, border control and consumer policy. As will be made explicit in the following, each of the articles tells us something about firstly, what big data is and how it relates to power. They secondly also shed light on how we should shape “the big data society” and what research questions need to be answered to be able to do so.

Relying on big data, modern surveillance becomes increasingly influential in determining societal power relations. Lyon argues that modern surveillance always categorises people entailing social effects, what he conceptualises as social sorting. This paper assesses if patterns of social sorting can be found in the EU surveillance systems for migration Schengen Information System (SIS), Visa Information System (VIS) and EUROpean DACtylographic comparison system (EURODAC), which are planned to be merged in order to ensure maximum efficiency in surveillance. To do so, the paper analyses relevant documents referring to SIS, VIS and EURODAC. These systems have assumed the traditional border function of deciding on societal inclusion and exclusion. I argue that, to some extent, socio-digital borders are drawn along the categories established through social sorting. The paper exemplifies how social sorting relying on big data may be a disempowering surveillance practice.

In 2011, a macaque monkey used a camera belonging to British photographer David Slater in Indonesia to take a self-portrait. The selfie picture became famous worldwide after it was published in the British media. In 2014 Slater sent a removal request to Wikimedia Commons, which indicated that the picture was in the public domain because it had been taken by the monkey and animals cannot own copyright works. While most of the legal analysis so far has been centred around US law, this article takes a completely different approach. Re-assessing jurisdictional issues, I examine the case from a UK and European perspective. The monkey selfie is of importance to internet policy: it has a lot to teach us about online jurisdiction. Under current originality rules, David Slater has a good copyright claim for ownership of the picture.

The internet has been seen as a medium that empowers individual political actors in relation to established political elites and media gatekeepers. The present article discusses this "net empowerment hypothesis" and tests it empirically by analysing Twitter communication on the regulation of net neutrality. We extracted 503.839 tweets containing #NetNeutrality posted between January and March 2015 and analysed central developments and the network structure of the debate. The empirical results show that traditional actors from media and politics still maintain a central role.

As international politics' developments heavily weigh on Russia's domestic politics, the internet is placed on top of the list of "threats" that the government must tackle, through an avalanche of legislations aiming at gradually isolating the Russian internet from the global infrastructure. The growth of the Russian internet market during the last couple of years is likely to remain secondary to the "sovereignisation" of Russia's internet. This article aims at understanding these contradictory trends, in an international context in which internet governance is at a crossroads, and major internet firms come under greater regulatory scrutiny from governments. The Russian 'dictatorship-of-the-law' paradigm is all but over: it is deploying online, with potentially harmful consequences for Russia's attempts to attract foreign investments in the internet sector, and for users' rights online.

Because of their multi-sided and dynamic nature, the application of competition law to online platforms may prove challenging. The paper maintains that existing competition concepts are flexible enough to be adequately applied to search engines and social networks. It is argued that, in order to take the fast-moving nature of these industries into account, relevant markets should not be defined along strict product boundaries and that the strength of potential competition constitutes a better indicator for dominance than the size of market share. Such an approach would make competition analysis more conducive to innovation and would better recognise its role in the dynamic online intermediary sector.

Data control, among the newest forms of power fostered by information and communication technologies (ICTs), triggers a continuous (re)negotiation of public and private orderings, with direct implications on both regulators and intermediaries. This article examines the stance of the European Union (EU) regarding the position of Google - the world’s largest internet services company as per its 2014 market value - in two controversial instances: the ‘right to be forgotten’ and the implementation of EU competition rules. It provides an analysis of these evolving debates and their meaning for EU regulatory thrust more broadly, discussing the shift in the approach to digital markets and the proactive development of a European framework influential beyond continental boundaries.

While internet privacy has been a central concern for quite a long time, the revelations by Edward Snowden about the US National Security Agency’s massive surveillance programme have highlighted the extent to which it is a core political issue. The privacy-surveillance controversy has prompted what is perhaps the most prominent and ambitious call in internet governance history to break the dominance of the United States' control over internet infrastructure: the Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance, or NETmundial (April 2014). The article analyses the current state of multi-stakeholderism in internet governance in light of this event. In particular, it argues for the necessity to leave the ‘Digital Cold War’ rhetoric behind if the internationalisation and the globalisation of internet governance is to move to the next level.

This article retraces the early stages of development of the 'peer-to-peer cloud' storage service Drizzle, with the aim of providing an example of decentralised network architecture as internet governance 'in practice'. More specifically, this paper sheds light on how changes in the architectural design of networked services affect the circulation, storage and privacy of data, as well as the rights and responsibilities exerted by different actors on them. This article does not mean to be a compendium of the implications of the decentralisation option in building a cloud platform, which entails a number of technical complications as well as advantages, including how to ensure the reliability and redundancy of data, and the soundness of the encryption mechanism. However, the privacy-related design choices described here are some of the many possible ways to illustrate the extent to which changes in network architecture are, indeed, changes in network governance.

Cloud computing services are increasingly hosted on international servers and distributed amongst multiple data centres. Given their global scope, it is often easier for large multinational corporations to effectively circumvent old taxation schemes designed around the concept of territorial jurisdiction and geographical settings. In view of obtaining tax revenues from these online operators whose business is partially carried out in France, the French government recently issued a report emphasising the need for new taxation rules that would better comply with the way value is generated in the digital economy: at the international level, it is suggested that taxation should be calculated according to the place of interaction with end-users; at the national level, the report suggests to introduce a transitory tax on data collection in order to promote innovation and encourage good online practices.

The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), two United Nations-sponsored conferences about information, communication and the establishment of a 21st century 'information society', took place in 2003 in Geneva and in 2005 in Tunis, setting the foundations for a 'multi-stakeholder' approach to global governance of information and communication technologies (ICTs). In February 2013, the Paris WSIS+10 review meeting has provided an occasion for scholars of internet governance actors to assess the present state of what was ten years ago – and still is – a set of experimental formats, procedures and processes for the governance of ICTs, seeking to reunite the private sector, governments and inter-governmental institutions and, civil society, under the auspices of 'multi-stakeholderism'. This article provides such an assessment and calls for a realistic and thorough assessment of multi-stakeholderism in ICT governance.

Regulation is a pillar of the development of cloud computing within the European Union. Equally relevant is whether other regions also adopt European regulation or not. Based on provisional evidence found in Brazil, Chile and Turkey, I suggest that there are at least three approaches to exporting or diffusing cloud-relevant regulation from one (hegemonic) region to emerging markets: (a) positive conditionality based on free trade agreements; (b) socialisation by means of multi-stakeholder deliberation; (c) a mix of conditionality and emulation based on legal certification. Beyond its heuristic value, the distinction also determines the legal consequences of each type of regulation export.