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China and the United States host the world's largest digital platforms. Platforms are multisided markets that facilitate value‐creating exchanges among users, such as social media, e‐commerce, software QJ;application downloads, search, email, and cloud services. Internet access and the purely digital nature of many of the products and services make digital platforms potentially global in scope. This means that the rules and restrictions governing the flow of capital and information services among national markets strongly influence the economic and social potential of digital platforms. The paper conducts a sequential analysis of the rise of barriers to the United States–China trade in ICT and digital platform markets from 2000 to 2021. We find that China's thriving platform economy was relatively open, competitive and market‐driven in its early stages, and benefited from U.S. capital and the entry of U.S. firms. Since 2009, both countries have progressively restricted access to each other's domestic information services markets. In both cases, the primary stated rationale involved national security claims rather than trade policy concerns. Drawing on International Political Economy theory, we label the United States–China interaction pattern digital neo‐mercantilism. Digital neo‐mercantilism fuses the power and security of the national state with economic development in the digital economy. Policymakers represent information flows and digital technologies in domestic policy discourse as critical to the security and relative power of the state, and pursue various forms of industrial policy, data localization, trade protectionism, or exclusion of foreigners as a result. Both the United States and China are following this policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liu and Yang (2022) argue that China's platform governance mechanism focuses more on content governance, while the United States focuses more on technology governance. The United States and China have the two largest and most innovative internet economies, yet there are major differences between their political systems, businesses, foreign policies and approaches to international law. [Extracted from the article]

This is a detailed case study of the development of a new cybersecurity standard, Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3, and its implications for the privacy of Internet users and the security and accountability of network operators. It contributes to a theoretical debate about whether protocols or standards can have values or can be considered political. We find that while the design choices in TLS 1.3 do enable greater security, the interests of the actors involved in the standardization process and the level of adoption and implementation were more important. The idea that political, economic, and social effects can be hard coded into protocol designs short-circuits careful analysis of the way standards contribute to governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In discussing the historical origins of sovereignty, Jens Bartelson (2018, 510) wrote, "Making sense of sovereignty. . . entails making sense of its component terms—supreme authority and territory—and how these terms were forged together into a concept." The question of sovereignty in cyberspace, however, inverts this historical "forging together," as territoriality and authority are sundered in cyberspace. This paper argues that attempts to apply sovereignty to cyberspace governance are inappropriate to the domain. It develops a technically grounded definition of "cyberspace" and examines its characteristics as a distinct domain for action, conflict, and governance, while clarifying its relationship to territoriality. It reviews the literature on cyberspace and sovereignty since the early 1990s, showing the emergence of explicitly pro-sovereigntist ideas and practices in the last ten years. The cyber-sovereignty debate is linked to IR research on the historical emergence of sovereignty, demonstrating how technologies routinely change the basis of international order and challenging the presumption that territorial sovereignty is a stable and uniform principle of international organization that can be presumptively applied to the internet. The paper also links the conceptual debate over cyber-sovereignty to the real-world geopolitical struggle over the governance of the internet, showing how different conceptions of sovereignty serve the interests of different powers, notably the United States, Russia, and China. The paper explores the relevance of an alternative governance model for cyberspace based on the global commons concept. It refutes the arguments made against that model and then explains what difference it might make to governance if we conceive of cyberspace in that way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper examines the legal and Internet governance controversies over country code top-level domain names (ccTLDs). In recent litigation (Weinstein v. Islamic Republic of Iran and ICANN), terrorism victims argued that ccTLDs are property and attempted to seize Iran's .IR domain for compensation. In refusing to uphold this claim, an appeals court ruled that a court-ordered redelegation would impair the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' (ICANN's) role in global Internet governance. While the .IR case is recent, the underlying tensions between state sovereignty, the role of ICANN and the rights of organizations that have been awarded ccTLDs have been simmering for two decades. Three governance models are in play: a sovereignty-based model, a property rights/market-based model, and a global public trustee model. The legal and political science literature leaves this Internet governance issue unexplored and unsettled, while court rulings on the property status of domains have been mixed or indecisive. Most legal scholars merely assume that states have sovereignty rights over their ccTLDs and do not critically assess the justification for, or the implications of, a sovereignty-based model. Likewise, many legal scholars, governments and Internet governance institutions have resisted recognizing TLD delegations as a property right, but their arguments are often based on misunderstandings of the economics and technology of the domain name system. Drawing on law, economics and sovereignty theories, this paper shows that top-level domain names have all the essential features of a property right. It argues that a governance regime that recognized them as such would be preferable to a regime based on sovereignty claims or a global public trustee model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using content analysis, this paper explores the policy-making trends for Internet governance in China. It examines the manner by which policy changes over time, the different policy-making agencies in the country, and the various application scopes and topical focuses of policy. This paper aims to determine the distribution of key policy decisions over different policy-making agencies and which policy issues receive the most attention from China's government in its efforts to regulate the Internet. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose – This article aims to quantify the emerging transfer market for internet protocol (IPv4) numbers and provides an initial assessment of factors and policies impacting those transactions.Design/methodology/approach – The research draws on Regional Internet Registry records and conducts basic analysis of stocks, flows and proportions to assess the nature of this emerging market for IP number blocks and explore some of its implications for internet governance.Findings – There is a thriving and growing market for IPv4 number blocks. The market is improving the efficiency of IPv4 address allocation by moving numbers from unused or under-utilized holders to organizations that need them more. Buyers willingly pay for number blocks they could get for free in order to benefit from more liberal needs assessments and stronger property rights.Research limitations/implications – Information about prices is not available and some transfers may take place through leasing arrangements, which are not covered by this paper. Future research should continue to investigate the transfer market, including activity skirting or occurring outside the current RIR policy environment.Practical implications – RIRs should liberalize needs assessments and remove other sources of friction to the transfer market.Originality/value – No known prior assessment of the transfer market has been conducted. The research has value for policymakers and industry decision makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The governance of the Internet provides one of the most important arenas in which new ideas regarding Internet studies can be applied and tested. This paper critiques the prevailing conceptualization of Internet governance. The label is routinely applied to the study of a few formal global institutions with limited or no impact on governance, but not to studies of the many activities that actually shape and regulate the use and evolution of the Internet, such as Internet service provider interconnection, security incident response or content filtering. Consequently, current conceptualizations of Internet governance inflate the presence and influence of state actors. Furthermore, they undermine efforts to understand how large-scale distributed systems in the global economy can be governed in the absence of formalized international regimes. We conclude by discussing how concepts of networked governance can be applied and extended to illuminate the study of Internet governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Two case studies explore the reciprocal influence between technological change and Internet governance. Both focus on the use by Internet service providers of a new capability known as deep packet inspection (DPI). DPI was used by major network operators in the U.S. and Canada to block or restrict the speed of peer to peer file sharing traffic by their customers. In both cases, DPI implementations led to public protests, litigation and major regulatory proceedings. In both cases, network neutrality norms were used to challenge DPI deployments. The paper''s descriptive comparison is supplemented by quantitative data drawn from the use of Glasnost, a network test that allows third parties to detect BitTorrent throttling via DPI. The paper asks whether the use of DPI by ISPs disrupted the way the Internet is regulated, and whether political and institutional factors alter or constrain DPI use. It finds that the power to shape traffic flows redistributes control among actors in the Internet ecosystem, generating broad political economy debates about efficiency, fairness, innovation and transparency. But the actual results of those conflicts are indeterminate, reflecting institutional and historical contingencies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper links the analysis of IP address policy to the established vocabulary and concepts of institutional economics. Internet addressing and routing are usually discussed in technical terms, yet embedded in this highly technical discourse are a number of critical economic concepts, such as scarcity, externalities, common pool resources, tragedy of the commons, and conflict over the distribution of costs. To solve these problems, governance institutions native to the Internet have evolved. Yet despite the centrality of addressing and routing to Internet governance, there is very little research literature that bridges economic, institutional and technical discussions of IP addressing and routing. This paper connects the techno-economic discussion to analysis of institutions and governance arrangements. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Internet's Whois service allows anyone to type a domain name into a Web interface and then receive the name and contact details of whoever has registered it. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) contracts make it mandatory to provide indiscriminate public access to this information. Data protection laws in Europe and other countries conflict with this ICANN policy, yet Whois has remained in place for a decade. This article offers an explanation for this puzzling contradiction. We use the concept of a default value to explain how the development of a technological system can change the institutional conditions under which rights claims can be realized. We also note that the Whois story poses problems for Daniel Drezner's theory of global governance. Despite disagreement between the two great powers, the ICANN regime provides effective global governance; Drezner's theory cannot explain how the rise of a technical system could produce a global shift in privacy policy and alter the bargaining power of Great Powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid-1990s, efforts have been under way to construct an international regime for global Internet governance. Beginning with the formation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, efforts at regime construction were a main focus of the 2001-2005 UN World Summit on the Information Society. However, little progress was made toward an international agreement. This reflected policymakers' ill-advised attempt to shortcut regime construction: they attempted to define regime rules and procedures without first defining underlying principles and norms. This article offers example sets of principles and norms of the type that are missing and that could provide the foundation for an Internet governance regime. The authors conclude that a framework convention would be the appropriate institutional mechanism for advancing regime construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes the case for using regular and objective procedures to assign new Internet top-level domain names (TLDs) instead of the unscheduled, irregular, discretionary and ad hoc processes and criteria currently used by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The paper shows that ICANNs current approach to TLD additions is anti-competitive and fosters rent-seeking, political strife, and the potential for corruption. The article argues that there is now and likely always will be demand for TLD additions. The article suggests that ICANN's role is not to second-guess the marketplace by choosing which of these TLDs are "good ideas" or most likely to succeed, but simply to coordinate TLD assignments. The article concludes by anticipating arguments that might be advanced against the proposed procedure, and welcoming the initial steps of ICANN, the OECD, and WIPO to address this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]