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In this paper, we aim to situate data portability within the evolving discussions of how to support data access for researchers studying the digital information environment. We explore how data donations, enabled by existing data access rights and data portability requirements, provide promising opportunities for supporting research on critical trust and safety topics. Evaluating other data access mechanisms that are more central to policy debates about platform transparency, we argue that data donations are a powerful additional mechanism that offer key legal, ethical, and scientific benefits. We then assess current challenges with using data donations for research and offer recommendations for various stakeholders to better align portability mechanisms with the needs of research. Taken together, we argue that although portability is often considered within a context of competition and user agency, regulators, industry actors, and researchers should understand and leverage portability's potential impact to empower critical research on the societal impacts of digital platforms and services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into digital platforms has become increasingly difficult. One way to overcome these difficulties is to build on data access rights in EU data protection law, which requires platforms to offer users a copy of their data. In data donation studies, researchers ask study participants to exercise this right and donate their data to science. However, there is increasing evidence that platforms do not comply with designated laws. We first discuss the obligations of data access from a legal perspective (with accessible, transparent, and complete data as key requirements). Next, we compile experiences from social scientists engaging in data donation projects as well as a study on data request/access. We identify 14 key challenges, most of which are a consequence of non-compliance by platforms. They include platforms’ insufficient adherence to (a) providing data in a concise and easily accessible form (e.g. the lack of information on when and how subjects can access their data); (b) being transparent about the content of their data (e.g. the lack of information on measures); and (c) providing complete data (e.g. the lack of all available information platforms process related to platform users). Finally, we formulate four central recommendations for improving the right to access.

Successful applications of artificial intelligence (AI), such as ChatGPT, have been prompting regulators to speed up the related regulation processes. China and the EU have been particularly ambitious in this regard. The EU AI Act has been swiftly progressing through the institutions and is expected to be officially adopted in spring 2024. This article argues that its overall approach is wrong, that it extends EU regulation into policy areas which come under national competences and that it will hurt European AI innovation in particular and society in general. Instead of regulating AI per se, the EU or the member states should regulate the use of AI in specific sectors or, better still, regulate it in technologically independent ways—by specifying what is allowed or prohibited, regardless of the technology used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – China’s globalizing Internet describes a situation where China is using the Internet as a tool or medium to transmit its voice on the world stage and enhance its influence over the global Internet governance system and the global digitalization process. Several concerns, however, exist regarding China’s globalizing Internet strategies. This paper aims to respond to these concerns and enhance the understanding of China’s globalizing Internet strategies. Design/methodology/approach – This paper will use content analysis to trace the policy development trajectory of China’s globalizing Internet, including policy vision, policy-making agencies and policy tools. Findings – The Chinese government has issued a considerable number of policies to regulate and promote the development of the Internet since 2014. The key trend that emerged from the analysis of China’s globalizing Internet policy is the cooperation among different agencies. Existing policies have comprehensively used the supply-oriented tools, the environment-oriented tools and the demand-oriented tools; and the last two tools have been used more frequently in recent years. Originality/value – The analysis results contribute to understanding how China uses digital technology to enhance its influence over the global Internet governance system.

Information and communications technology (ICT) companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter are vitally important to billions of users around the world, not only in their day-to-day personal and professional lives, but also in their ability to shape social and political reality. Yet there is a pervasive lack of clarity around the policies and practices that govern user engagement on these platforms and sites, and the values that undergird them. This information is of great importance to policy researchers and civil society advocates, particularly in the wake of numerous recent events that have put the relative power and opacity of ICT companies in the spotlight. Access to information about them is often incredibly difficult to obtain, when it is available at all. These difficulties are faced by many categories of people interested in researching ICT companies, from academics to journalists, and from civil society advocates to policy researchers. In this white paper, we outline some of the challenges we have identified as being particularly acute for policy researchers, as well as strategies for working through (and around) those issues.

Despite an abundance of literature highlighting the necessity of achieving digital parity in lowincome communities, a concrete characterization of the internet as essential household infrastructure remains elusive. The original research presented in this paper uses Social Systems Theory as a framework for investigating how social housing residents use at-home internet to support their household activities and domestic routines. The findings illustrate how internet use within the household can increase the efficiency and breadth of routine activities, and become normalized within the household as a result. The results also highlight the motivations for internet adoption in older adult households, as well as the implications for household labour and finances associated with internet service termination in family households. These findings are relevant for scholars interested in domestic internet use in elderly and family households, and for policymakers hoping to alleviate digital inequity in low-income communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dataset comprises text and metadata extracted from several hundred IT-blogs and websites, along with a method to duplicate the data by updating its contents and downloading it to the user’s local machine. The targets have been hand-picked with the intention to represent the discourse on blogs and websites dedicated to questions at the intersection of technology and society from Germany and the United States of America. The texts have been retrieved by web crawling techniques. The resulting corpus is accessible through a search platform and also reproducible with freely accessible descriptors and software.

This paper argues for localizing the provisioning of broadband internet access within the portfolio of municipal services with a view to achieving universal service penetration. In supporting this proposition, this paper first offers a critique of how the centralization of regulatory oversight at the federal level has proven problematic in meeting universal service objectives. The paper then presents a rationale and proposition for provisioning household broadband services in low-income urban areas through municipal social and subsidized housing undertakings, and as a partial redress to broadband disenfranchisement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores global journalistic discussions of deepfake applications (audiovisual manipulating applications based on artificial intelligence (AI)) to understand the narratives constructed through global coverage, the regulatory actions associated with these offered narratives, and the functions such narratives might serve in global sociopolitical contexts. Through a qualitative–interpretive narrative analysis, this article shows how journalists frame deepfakes as a destabilizing platform that undermines a shared sense of social and political reality, enables the abuse and harassment of women online, and blurs the acceptable dichotomy between real and fake. This phenomenon is tied to discussions of dis/misinformation, manipulation, exploitation, and polarization in the media ecosystem these days. Based on these findings, the article then provides broader practical and theoretical insights about AI content regulation and ethics, accountability, and responsibility in digital culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to understand China's internet governance, this paper examined 1,931 Internet policies of China by bibliometric techniques. Specifically, the bibliometric techniques include simple document counting, co-word analysis, collaboration network analysis and citation analysis. The findings include: (1) China's Internet legislations mainly emphasized e-commerce and Internet governance, and, to some extent, neglected personal data protection; (2) China's Internet is under intensive multiple regulatory controls by central government. A large number of government agencies are involved in Internet policy-making. The Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Information Leading Group of the State Council, enforced fewer policy documents, but occupy higher positions in the Internet governance hierarchy; (3) China's Internet legislation system is primarily composed of industry-specific administrative rules, rather than laws or administrative regulations. Nevertheless, laws and administrative regulations received significantly more citations owing to their superior force. This paper also discussed current gaps in China's internet governance and how the country's internet policies are situated in the broader global context.

The dataset comprises text and metadata extracted from several hundred IT-blogs and websites, along with a method to duplicate the data by updating its contents and downloading it to the user's local machine. The targets have been hand-picked with the intention to represent the discourse on blogs and websites dedicated to questions at the intersection of technology and society from Germany and the United States of America. The texts have been retrieved by web crawling techniques. The resulting corpus is accessible through a search platform and also reproducible with freely accessible descriptors and software. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Turkey's multifaceted cyberspace governance policy and argues that positioned between two opposites of cyberspace governance that has close military and security ties to the West, and domestic Internet policies more similar of Russia-China axis, Turkey should be considered as a swing state in global cyberspace governance debates. The article shows that despite her official discourse on multi-stakeholderism and its compliance with the emerging norms in the Euro-Atlantic alliance concerning cyber-security, cyber-crime, and cyber-defense; Turkey's domestic Internet policy converges towards the Russia-China axis characterized by the rise of information controls and increasing efforts to establish "digital sovereignty" to national cyber space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editors’ introduction provides a short summary of the Snowden revelations and the paradoxical political and public responses to them. It further provides an overview of the current academic debate triggered by the Snowden case and the documents leaked by him and introduces the articles featured in this issue on post-Snowden Internet policy.

The notion of digital rights has recently generated a number of political declarations and civil society initiatives across the world. By critically examining these declarations and academic debates on digital rights, this article asks: Why is it that information policy issues are increasingly framed in terms of individual rights? And on what understandings of rights do various political, corporate, and civil society declarations of digital rights rest? The article identifies four discourses of digital rights, linked to different ideological assumptions and political contexts. Finally, possible limitations and pathologies of the rights discourse are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates what risks to the public interest may arise in Internet policy development facilitated by Canada’s communications regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). It finds that different risks exist in four distinct phases of CRTC policy formation. Although these threats are wide-ranging, they often relate to the strategic behaviors of well-resourced groups that advocate for policy positions that are adjacent or contrary to the public interest, a regulatory process in some ways unsuited for robust civil society participation, and the resource constraints of public interest groups that regularly participate in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines African Internet users' experience of online freedom to assess levels of trust and mistrust of the Internet in Africa. Internet users' perception of the protection or denial of their rights online--such as freedom of expression, privacy, and safety and security--in selected African countries is examined here as an outcome of constraining or enabling Internet policy and regulatory frameworks. Demand-side survey data collected via nationally representative ICT access and use surveys in 2017 is analyzed within the context of the Internet ecosystem as it plays out at the national level in three sub-Saharan African countries: Nigeria, Rwanda, and South Africa. Findings are contextualized within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals, emphasizing the role that the Internet plays in contributing to the growth of a country when relevant policies are formulated in a way that addresses users' needs while safeguarding their rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the prevailing ways Internet shutdowns are currently understood and makes the case for a new conceptualization--one that recognizes the inherent diversity of cases and how and why they are employed. To do so, we focus on Internet shutdowns in Africa, drawing on data collected during our ongoing research into the politics and practice of social media and conflict in Africa. Though Africa is not the only continent on which Internet shutdowns are taking place, it provides a landscape where the presence of various alternative versions of shutdowns produces important reactions and policy outcomes. A spectrum approach allows for more nuanced conceptualization rather than thinking of shutdowns as a homogeneous technique. This recognizes the variations--both subtle and extreme--among different aspects of Internet shutdowns, including their frequency, duration, breadth, depth, and speed. It also helps to situate this practice more clearly within the wider landscape of other approaches to censorship and offers indications as to how Internet shutdowns might evolve in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of the Internet has been narrated many times. However, political histories of the Internet with a non-US-centric focus are still an uncharted research area. This paper contributes to closing that research gap. It reconstructs the Internet's history in Germany through the lens of semantic changes in press coverage on politics. In our investigation, we sought to analyse semantic change as a political history by drawing on insights concerning the relationship between semantic change and political conflict from the perspective of discourse theory and theoretical reflections on politicisation. The study follows our intuition that semantic struggles of the past leave traces in word contexts. Conversely, it uncovers semantic change by following the traces of semantic struggles in these contexts. In line with this rationale, we conducted a 'blended reading' of word contexts that relied on a quantitatively assisted qualitative text analysis. The study finds that the Internet has long been understood predominantly as a tool for politics in the political public. In the late 2000s, its perception as a highly politicised object of governance also became dominant. While the Internet was always associated with a medium and a public sphere, its characterisation changed from 'web 1.0' to a 'web of corporations'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how and why activist groups representing marginalized communities of color are increasingly engaging in communications technology policy issues, particularly in relation to issues of digital access and representation. It explores three distinct but related case studies to disentangle the issues and concerns of a range of communities of color, and the challenges and opportunities for their advocates in navigating the highly technical communications technology policy arena: the first case study, which centers on the NAACP's original opposition to net neutrality, reveals the primacy of issues surrounding the "digital divide" to populations of color, and the difficulties of engaging in technical conversations surrounding Internet governance when issues of access persist. Meanwhile, the second case reviews the campaign by Free Press to promote set-top box liberalization as an issue of representation and diversity to both policymakers and citizens. The final case, which examines the work of the Tribal International Carrier to build an alternative internet service network for Native populations, highlights the precarity which organizations must strategically navigate in order to mitigate the influence of both the state and large corporations over Internet policy issues in order to both serve and represent their constituents. In all, this paper presents and extends upon a novel approach to communications policy research, foregrounding the need to integrate critical race frameworks and, relatedly, to center the breadth, depth, and lived experiences of communities of color, which can therein facilitate more inclusive digital media and communication environments and policy structures. • Communities of color, are increasingly involved in telecommunications policy debates. • The first-level digital divide disproportionately affects communities of color. • Communities of color are not monolithic in their motivations, resources and positions in telecommunications policy. • Critical Race Theory is an important lens for policy discussion to include communities of color. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Drawing on the increasing body of literature on policy stakeholders and the ever-growing acknowledgement that communication policy is crafted by more than just parliamentarians and formal communication regulators this paper examines the role that another set of regulators plays in communication policy: agriculture regulators. Based on a study of the United States Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service (RUS), this paper explores alternative agents of communication policy. More specifically, through document analysis we examine the way in which the Rural Utilities Service has shaped rural broadband policy in the United States over the last three decades. The implications for this research are wide, as it brings another policy actor into the policy making melee, and pushes communication policy scholars to consider the role that non-traditional communication regulators play in the communication policy making process. Highlights • The role of the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) in American telecommunications policy is significant but uninvestigated. • The role of RUS in rural broadband policy and deployment is ambiguous. • There are multiple regulators in American rural broadband policy. • RUS shifts between being a definitive, dominant, dormant, and discretionary stakeholder in rural broadband policy. • RUS is a reluctant regulator in rural broadband. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do solicitation sites lead to an increase in prostitution trends in United States? We shed light on this issue by examining the impact that Craigslist (via its Erotic Service section) has on prostitution incidence using a data set consisting of 1,796 U.S. counties from 1999 to 2008. Our analysis shows that prostitution levels increased by about 17% on average upon the introduction of the Craigslist. We find that the Craigslist has led to the increase in both independent sex workers and workers operating under commercial vice groups. However, it is the latter that is growing at a greater rate, which bears important implications for policies concerning sex trafficking. Craigslist's entry increases prostitution in both counties that have existing prostitution trends and those that do not, although the former set of counties experience a larger growth relative to the latter. Finally, we also found evidence suggesting that efforts in utilizing Craigslist for prostitution arrests are not catching up with the growth in prostitution trends induced by the site. In sum, online platforms can be utilized in unintended manners that facilitate illegal activities. Policy makers and website owners need to be aware of such impacts to implement the proper guidelines. The internet facilitates information flow between sex workers and buyers, making it easier to set up paid sexual transactions online. Despite the illegality of selling sexual services online, Section 230 of Communications Decency Act shields websites from liability for unlawful postings by third parties. Consequently, websites such as Craigslist have become a haven for prostitution-related ads. With prostitution-related sites still in operation, it is imperative to understand the link between these sites and prostitution trends. Specifically, in this paper, we quantify the economic impact of Craigslist's entry on prostitution incidence and identify potential pathways in which the website affects the sex industry. Using a national panel data set for 1,796 U.S. counties from 1999 to 2008, our analyses suggest that entry of Craigslist to a county leads to a 17.58% increase in prostitution cases. In addition, the analyses reveal that a majority of prostitution activity on Craigslist is induced by organized vice groups, in addition to voluntary participation by smaller set of independent providers. Further, we find site entry has a stronger impact in counties with a past history of prostitution and produces spillover effects in neighboring locations that are not directly served by Craigslist. Sex workers providing niche sexual services are found to increase with site entry. In addition, we learn that site entry leads to an increase in transactions of existing workers and also attracts new workers to the market. We find that the increase in prostitution arrests does not catch up with the growth in prostitution trends brought in by Craigslist. Finally, we find complementarity effects between erotic and casual sex ads in leading to the increase of prostitution. Our results contribute broadly to the emerging literature on the societal challenges associated with online intermediaries and internet penetration, and serve to provide guidelines for policy makers in regulating the sex industry in the internet era. The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2018.0799. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unique among major communications media, the Internet has delivered vast public benefit while being designed, developed, and deployed largely through private initiative and nongovernmental funding. At the same time, key public policy decisions were made early on that established the legal and regulatory foundations necessary for economic innovation and free expression to flourish. Those foundations include strong free speech protections, liability limits on Internet platforms, protections against excessive government surveillance, open technical standards, individual privacy protection, and some form of net neutrality. Those foundations were laid when the Internet was young. As part of a roundtable on "Competing Visions for Cyberspace," this essay argues that as the business, social, and technical impact of the Internet has become clearer globally, some of these principles require adjustment, but all will remain important if we are to preserve the economic potential of the Internet environment going forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to understand China's internet governance, this paper examined 1,931 Internet policies of China by bibliometric techniques. Specifically, the bibliometric techniques include simple document counting, co-word analysis, collaboration network analysis and citation analysis. The findings include: (1) China's Internet legislations mainly emphasized e-commerce and Internet governance, and, to some extent, neglected personal data protection; (2) China's Internet is under intensive multiple regulatory controls by central government. A large number of government agencies are involved in Internet policy-making. The Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Information Leading Group of the State Council, enforced fewer policy documents, but occupy higher positions in the Internet governance hierarchy; (3) China's Internet legislation system is primarily composed of industry-specific administrative rules, rather than laws or administrative regulations. Nevertheless, laws and administrative regulations received significantly more citations owing to their superior force. This paper also discussed current gaps in China's internet governance and how the country's internet policies are situated in the broader global context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines privacy law and Human Flesh Search (HFS) on the Chinese Internet. HFS is spontaneous, widely participated search and publication of targeted individuals' personal information on the Internet. This research sees HFS as an important form of noninstitutional information gathering and publication, and argues that the regulation of HFS is not only about privacy but also linedrawing for information collection and dissemination in the digital setting. Therefore, legal instruments and court cases in relation to HFS and online privacy must be assessed as important components of the Chinese state's Internet regulatory scheme. This research finds that the paired concepts of 'flexibility and populism,' key features of legal reform and development in contemporary China, are highly relevant to analyze the growth of digital privacy laws in China. The political-legal authorities' experimentation and innovation in the development of the law shed important light on how China's Internet governance adapts to changing circumstances and strives to keep pace with profound social transformations in new technological environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese government plays a crucial role in domestic Internet development. This research represents the first attempt to comprehensively investigate the history and evolution of government agencies that are important in regulating the Internet. The study finds that the China's Internet governance can be classified into four models: (1) the Central Leading Group model; (2) the centrally led, governed by specialty model; (3) the multi-pronged management model; and (4) the recentralization of Internet governance. The historical development of these models represents an overall trend in China's cyberspace governance, which evolved from campaigns at the ministry/commission level into a top-down approach to governance, from administrative management into specialized management, and from decentralized management into centralized coordination. Moreover, changes in the regulatory responsibility and authority of various agencies indicate a shift of government priorities from technology development and infrastructure building to cyber security, informatization and ideological security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A socio-technical lens on the development of the Internet suggests that policymaking plays a constitutive role in the meanings of technology and its uses. In the Canadian context, I trace how early "information society" discourses underlying negative policy strategies continued into current discursive legitimations of the Internet as essential communications infrastructure. The federal regulator's 2015-2016 Review of Basic Telecommunications Services public proceedings forms a case study that highlights how certain discourses become legitimized and others recede, ultimately resulting in a maintenance of the regulatory status quo despite the appearance of a public interest imperative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US-centric Internet history situates the start of the net neutrality debate around 2003, but a look at global Internet histories indicates otherwise. To wit: this case study of the forgotten net neutrality struggle that took place in France between 1979 and 1982. In 1978, the French PTT started "Minitel," the world's first successful mass market online ecosystem. The Minitel experience prefigured most of the legal, economic, industrial, and other public policy issues we face today in cyberspace. The concept of network neutrality was explicitly debated by administrators and regulators – only to be rejected upon pressure from the incumbent print press industry, which foresaw its own impending demise and did all it could to hinder the development of open and neutral digital fora. Minitel has been derided by many scholars and policy wonks as the epitome of statism that precluded real and meaningful innovation from emerging from the edges. This article demonstrates instead that hindrances to net neutrality in France in the early 1980s were the result of private sector lobbying, not of PTT administrators. It provides a counter-narrative grounded in historical data, to fuel further thinking about what policies will better support private innovation over modern online platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we apply an attention economic perspective to explain current and predict future trends in our society. We first describe the rise of the attention economy, and we highlight one important mechanism of this economy: a spiral of attention scarcity. Second, we show that an attention economic perspective provides glimpses of a potential future. In particular, we predict an information environment that increasingly targets citizens with attention-grabbing content, form, and technology; a continuing trend toward excessive media consumption levels; and a continuing trend toward inattentive uses of information. We also predict increasing problems of public misinformation and misconceptions; an increased prevalence of certain mental and physical health issues; and an increased reliance on technology to perform mental tasks. At the end of this paper, we show why and how despite these predictions, alternative futures are conceivable. These alternatives largely depend on the behavior of various social actors. We discuss resistance to the attention economy by consumers and producers, a laissez-faire policy toward the attention economy, a policy of taxing attention-seeking efforts, and the promotion of public values in regulatory policies toward the internet. • An attention economic perspective is applied to predict future trends in society. • A spiral of increasing attention scarcity is proposed. • The perspective predicts trends in the media environment and in media behaviors. • The perspective also predicts misperceptions, health problems, and the offloading of cognitive tasks to technology. • Alternatives to these predictions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under Xi Jinping's leadership, China has actively promoted 'Internet sovereignty' as a means to reshape the discourse and practices of global cyber governance. By analyzing Chinese-language literature, this article unpacks the Chinese discourse of Internet sovereignty. Despite significant interest in promoting it as China's normative position on cyberspace, we find that Chinese formulations of Internet sovereignty are fragmented, diverse, and underdeveloped. There are substantial disagreements and uncertainty over what Internet sovereignty is and how it can be put into practice. This is principally due to the evolving pattern of Chinese policy formation, whereby political ideas are often not clearly defined when first proposed by Chinese leaders. This article argues that an underdeveloped domestic discourse of Internet sovereignty has significantly restricted China's capacity to provide alternative norms in global cyberspace. Appreciating this ambiguity, diversity, and, sometimes, inconsistency is vital to accurate understanding of transformations in global cyber governance occasioned by China's rise. Related Articles [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editors' introduction provides a short summary of the Snowden revelations and the paradoxical political and public responses to them. It further provides an overview of the current academic debate triggered by the Snowden case and the documents leaked by him and introduces the articles featured in this issue on post-Snowden Internet policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]