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For over twenty years, alternative forms of organising and networking – fuelled by the Internet but sometimes pre-dating it – have been discussed as possible responses to the dynamics of concentration, centralisation and capture exemplified in the current pervasively digital world by Internet giants such as Google and Facebook. This article takes stock of the lessons learned by the authors in over a decade of research on decentralised/P2P network architectures and on information commons, to suggest some ‘ways forward’ for these alternatives for the Internet.

This article analyses an ensemble of interdisciplinary research efforts, grounded mainly in science and technology studies (STS), which – based upon Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star’s seminal work – seeks to study informational and digital infrastructures according to their “materiality”, arguing that there is a need to overcome an understanding of infrastructures as purely physical. The article shows the usefulness of this perspective for the researcher seeking to use the “infrastructure” notion as a heuristic tool in order to understand the governance of digital information and networks, the Internet first and foremost.

In response to the growing censorship of their national Internet, Russian users, content producers and service providers have developed several resistance tactics. This paper analyzes these tactics with particular attention paid to their materiality. It first addresses the different levels of Internet “governance by infrastructure” in Russia, then focuses on the different tactics of individual and collective resistance and concludes by discussing how forms of control enacted at different levels of infrastructure are reconfiguring the geopolitics of the Russian Internet.

This interview with Jean-Marc Manach – investigative reporter, specialist of surveillance and privacy protection on the Internet, and a wellknown French “hacker-journalist” – explores the issues of cyberconflict and cybersurveillance, focusing on the broad phenomenon of “piracy”. In doing so, the interview outlines the different definitions, framings and reconfigurations of those practices, enacted by network users, which have been labeled as “pirate” by different economic and political actors of the Internet value chain. Following Manach’s reflections, the interview provides a few benchmarks towards a critical perspective on “piracy” as an ensemble of situated practices which places us, perhaps for the best of our society, in the condition of being “all pirates” of today’s digital networks – engaged in the construction and sharing of cyberknowledge.

This article discusses some of the results of a five-year-long (and ongoing) investigation of alternative approaches to the design of internet services, based on decentralized network architectures. In particular, the paper focuses on the implications of this research for the study and the practice of internet governance, inasmuch as architectural changes affect the repartition of responsibilities between service providers, content producers, users and network operators; contribute to the shaping of user rights, of the ways to produce and enforce law; reconfigure the boundary between public and private uses of the internet as a global facility. I argue that delving into the tensions between the dwarfs and the giants of the Net – between different technical and organizational architectures, and their political consequences – helps us to disengage from what is often a predominantly institutional view of internet governance, and give due emphasis to its less visible, infrastructure-embedded arrangements, its materiality and its practice.

The creation and implementation of the Haute Autorité pour la diffusion des œuvres et la protection des droits sur Internet (High Authority for the diffusion of works and the protection of rights on the Internet, or Hadopi) is an occasion to observe the extent to which copyright is a performative system. The French legislator, to cope with the steady rise of downloads of copyright-protected digital content, attempts to fill “by law” the gap opened by the digital (r)evolution in the general anti-counterfeiting regime. This article follows the attempts to reconcile several conflicting dynamics – metrological frailties, difficulties of definition, diversity of infractions. Ultimately, a newly-created infraction, defined by unprecedented legal, material and moral components, provides a reference point allowing to restore – albeit tentatively – the authority of law on undefinable, unseizable objects, by defining as infringement the “failure to secure” one’s Internet connection.

This article looks at the contribution economy, i.e., what industrial and collective actors do with the contributions of internet users. A new economy is emerging that gathers and processes the comments, assessments, comparisons, and ratings posted by netsurfers and uses this raw material to generate added value in various forms. This article examines some of the activities being developed to create value from these contributions by exploring the cultural industries field.

This special issue makes an argument for, and illustrates, the applicability of a science and technology studies (STS) informed approach to internet governance research. The conceptual framework put forward in this editorial and the articles composing this issue add to the mainstream internet governance scholarship by unpacking macro questions of politics and power. They do so through the analysis of the mundane and taken-for-granted practices and discourses that constitute the design, regulation, maintenance, and use of both technical and institutional arrangements of internet governance. Together, this body of work calls to rethink how we conceptualise both internet and governance.

Online peer-production platforms facilitate the coordination of creative work and services. Generally considered as empowering participatory tools and a source of common good, they can also be, however, alienating instruments of digital labour. This paper proposes a typology of peer-production platforms, based on the centralization/decentralization levels of several of their design features. Between commons-based peer-production and crowdsourced, user-generated content “enclosed” by corporations, a wide range of models combine different social, political, technical and economic arrangements. This combined analysis of the level of (de)centralization of platform features provides information on emancipation capabilities in a more granular way than a market-based qualification of platforms, based on the nature of ownership or business models only. The five selected features of the proposed typology are: ownership of means of production, technical architecture/design, social organization/governance of work patterns, ownership of the peer-produced resource, and value of the output.

Different disciplines and fields of study seem to be heralding the rise of an interdisciplinary scientific and intellectual movement focused on digital heritage, operationally defined as the ensemble of documents and information created in digital formats and subjected to preservation policies developed by individuals, companies and institutions. This article seeks to address some of the methodological challenges that – notwithstanding a diverse, thriving body of work that is currently contributing to the establishment of the scholarship on digital heritage – are currently facing scholarly attempts to consider digital heritage in its plurality. At the present, exploratory stage of the digital heritage scientific/intellectual movement, contributions to a reflection on the very foundations of this movement are needed, so as to refine the possible approaches of future digital heritage-related studies. This article is meant to provide such a contribution, drawing on the authors’ experience with interdisciplinary approaches to subjects of study such as alternative, decentralized infrastructures for Internet services, or the techno-legal governance of data, the commons and the public domain. The article reflects on practical tools, and epistemological/theoretical foundations, allowing to define and to include in the analysis all the facets of digital heritage – its archives, traces and instruments.

This article addresses the ongoing, increasing privatization of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing systems – the emergence of systems that users may only join by personal, friend-to-friend invitation. It argues that, within P2P systems, privacy is increasingly coinciding with “mere” invisibility vis-à-vis the rest of the Internet ecosystem because of a trend that has shaped the recent history of P2P technology: The alternation between forms of pervasive surveillance of such systems, and reactions by developers and users to such restrictive measures. Yet, it also suggests that the richness of today’s landscape of P2P technology development and use, mainly in the field of Internet-based services, opens up new dimensions to the conceptualization of privacy, and may give room to a more articulate definition of the concept as related to P2P technology; one that includes not only the need of protection from external attacks, and the temporary outcomes of the competition between surveillance and counter-surveillance measures, but also issues such as user empowerment through better control over personal information, reconfiguration of data management practices, and removal of intermediaries in sharing and communication activities.

The analysis of technical and scientific controversies has emerged over the last thirty years as one of the cornerstones of the study of science and technology embedded in their social and cultural contexts. This article focuses on research and teaching experiences, conducted at the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI) of MINES ParisTech, revolving around the analysis of controversies. It examines their origins, mutual influences and key principles to finally discuss how a pragmatic approach to the study of controversies constitutes an opportunity for the development or evolution of innovative teaching methods, able to include a critical approach to the very contents of knowledge, and means of learning. Far from refusing the search for objectivity itself, this approach proposes to seek objectivity by means of dense descriptions of the associations that develop in and around the subject of study.

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.

The architecture of a networked system is its underlying technical and logical structure, including transmission equipment, communication protocols, infrastructure, and connectivity between its components or nodes. This article introduces the idea of network architecture as internet governance, and more specifically, it outlines the dialectic between centralised and distributed architectures, institutions and practices, and how they mutually affect each other. The article argues that network architecture is internet governance in the sense that, by changing the design of the networks subtending internet-based services and the global internet itself, its politics are affected – the balance of rights between users and providers, the capacity of online communities to engage in open and direct interaction, the fair competition between actors of the internet market.

Algorithms are increasingly often cited as one of the fundamental shaping devices of our daily, immersed-in-information existence. Their importance is acknowledged, their performance scrutinised in numerous contexts. Yet, a lot of what constitutes 'algorithms' beyond their broad definition as “encoded procedures for transforming input data into a desired output, based on specified calculations” (Gillespie, 2013) is often taken for granted. This article seeks to contribute to the discussion about 'what algorithms do' and in which ways they are artefacts of governance, providing two examples drawing from the internet and ICT realm: search engine queries and e-commerce websites’ recommendations to customers. The question of the relationship between algorithms and rules is likely to occupy an increasingly central role in the study and the practice of internet governance, in terms of both institutions’ regulation of algorithms, and algorithms’ regulation of our society.

New generic top-level domain names (gTLDs) are the highest level of domain names in the domain name system (DNS); their number has been restricted to twenty-two for several years, and ICANN has implemented restrictions on the ways in which they are operated. The new gTLD programme, proposed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in early 2013, enables businesses and organisations to apply for their own customised top-level domain names, thereby greatly expanding their current number. ICANN’s move is the most recent controversial one in a subfield of DNS management and internet governance, already rife with political and economic controversies. What are the implications of this 'turn' to new gTLDs? This article attempts to outline them, and addresses the impact of the new gTLDs programme on Europe’s action-taking in the internet governance realm. The article also considers the likely impact of the new programme on ICANN’s governance and weight vis-à-vis other important internet governance actors.

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.

Private actors in the information technology sector are currently playing an increasingly important role in content mediation, as well as in regulation of online forms of expression, with implications for both internet rights and economic freedom. The “privatisation of internet governance” (DeNardis, 2010), is not a new dynamic; however, in a scenario in which users are taking advantage of increasingly sophisticated technology, the centralisation and concentration characterising today’s most widespread internet services are contributing to the accentuation of this tendency. The 'inherently political' qualities of search engine algorithm development, video content removals, blocking of domain names – actions that originate and rest with the private sector’s handling of the internet’s infrastructure – should not be neglected in our assessment of the field of internet governance today.

Transformative Works and Cultures' editorial policies are transformative in their own right, putting fans first and acknowledging the dual nature of acafans.

This essay explores writing practices in a fan community having to give life to a story deprived of an "official" version: the television series Earth 2. I argue that fan fiction writing for this prematurely canceled series exhibits peculiar features in comparison to fan writing for established series: for example, temporality, choice of protagonists, character pairings, and challenges to the original conception(s) of the series. Writing fan fiction for a canceled series is not about creating alternatives to an existing story, but about filling in gaps; it brings to light the ways in which fan fiction deals with closure. I take as a case study Earth 2, a series aired by NBC in the United States in 1994–95, whose first and only season ended in a cliffhanger episode hinting that a mysterious ailment had struck the main and most popular character. Shortly afterward, a significant number of Earth 2 Web sites, online conventions, and especially fan stories started developing; they explored what could have happened next and bore nostalgic but combative mottoes and titles such as "May the Journey Continue." I explore the specific features of Earth 2 fan fiction production and sharing by analyzing the main Earth 2 fan fiction archives on the Web and the responses to my email interviews of fan writers. Exemplars of the Earth 2 case are compared to those of other science fiction TV series, both prematurely canceled (Firefly, Space: Above and Beyond) and long-lived (Babylon 5, Star Trek: Deep Space 9).