"Researching Internet Governance" Recap and Extended Q&A

On September 22, 2020, the Internet Governance Lab organized a virtual and globally distributed book launch for Researching Internet Governance: Methods, Frameworks, Futures, a new open access and multidisciplinary book co-edited by the Lab’s Faculty Co-Directors Dr. Laura DeNardis, Dr. Derrick Cogburn, and Dr. Nanette Levinson, along with Global Fellow Dr. Francesca Musiani. The meeting was co-presented by the American University School of Communication, the School of International Service Office of Research, the Kogod School of Business, and the Washington DC Chapter of the Internet Society.

Moderated by Anriette Esterhuysen, Chair of the UN’s Internet Governance Forum Multistakeholder Advisory Group and Senior Advisor for Global and Regional Internet Governance at the Association for Progressive Communications, the discussion provided an overview of the book’s chapters while discussing the importance of contemporary Internet Governance research. The lineup of Internet governance luminaries included:

  • Dr. Laura DeNardis

    • Interim Dean, AU School of Communication; Faculty Co-Director, Internet Governance Lab; Director of Research, Global Commission on Internet Governance

    • Chapter: Internet Governance as an Object of Research Inquiry

  • Dr. Sandra Braman

    • Professor, Department of Communication at Texas A&M University; Editor, Information Policy Book Series at MIT Press

    • Chapter: The Irony of Internet Governance Research: Metagovernance as Context

  • Dr. Milton Mueller

    • Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Public Policy; co-Founder and Director, Internet Governance Project (IGP)

    • Chapter co-authored with Dr. Farzaneh Badiei: Inventing Internet Governance: The Historical Trajectory of the Phenomenon and the Field

  • Dr. Francesca Musiani

    • Associate Research Professor & Deputy Director, Center for Internet and Society (CIS)

    • Chapter: Science and Technology Studies Approaches to Internet Governance: Controversies and Infrastructures as Internet Politics

  • Dr. Rolf H. Weber

    • Chairholder, Private, Economic and European Law, University of Zurich; Director, European Law Institute; Visiting Professor, University of Hong Kong

    • Chapter: A Legal Lens into Internet Governance

  • Dr. Wendy Hall

    • Professor, Computer Science; Associate Vice President & Executive Director, Web Science institute at the University of South Hampton

    • Chapter co-authored with Aastha Madaan, and Kieron O’Hara: Web Observatories: Gathering Data for Internet Governance

  • Dr. Eric Jardine

    • Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Virginia Tech; Fellow, Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI)  

    • Chapter: Taking the Growth of the Internet Seriously When Measuring Cybersecurity

  • Dr. Rikke Frank Jørgensen

    • Senior Researcher, Danish Institute for Human Rights

    • Chapter: Researching Technology Elites: Lessons Learned from Data Collection at Google and Facebook

  • Dr. Derrick L. Cogburn

    • Professor, AU School of International Service, AU Kogod School of Business, Information Technology & Analytics; Faculty Co-Director, Internet Governance Lab

    • Chapter: Big Data Analytics and Text Mining in Internet Governance Research: Computational Analysis of Transcripts from 12 Years of the Internet Governance Forum

  • Niels ten Oever

    • PhD candidate, DATACTIVE Research Group at the Media Studies and Political Science department at the University of Amsterdam; postdoctoral scholar (abd), Communications Department at Texas A&M University

    • Chapter co-authored with Stefania Milan and Davide Beraldo: Studying Discourse in Internet Governance through Mailing-List Analysis

  • Dr. Ronald J. Deibert

    • Professor, Political Science, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto; Director, Citizen Lab

    • Chapter: The Biases of Information Security Research

  • Dr. Jeanette Hofmann

    • Professor, Internet Politics, Freie Universität Berlin; Research, Social Science Center Berlin (WZB)

    • Chapter: The Multistakeholder Concept as Narrative: A Discourse Analytical Approach

  • Dr. Nanette S. Levinson

    • Associate Professor, AU School of International Service; Academic Director of the SIS/Sciences-Po Exchange; Faculty Co-Director, Internet Governance Lab
      Chapter: Toward Future Internet Governance Research and Methods: Internet Governance Learning

Apart from summarizing their chapters, each author was asked to share their greatest fears or hopes for the field, which included climate change, the specter of totalitarianism, disruption of Internet standards, fragmentation of the Internet and increases in inequality. Among the hopes were an enhancement of participation and coordination in policy making, the decolonization of Internet infrastructure, the prospect that individuals could reclaim their data, increased inclusivity, innovation and ethical improvisation in the field, and that society can tackle the fears presented by the authors.

Speakers also answered an intriguing set of questions posed by our audience of more than 150 attendees. Leading off the Q&A was Fiona Alexander, Distinguished Fellow-in-Residence at the Internet Governance Lab, who asked the authors to explain how they think about academic participation as a stakeholder group in Internet Governance processes. Does this hinder or help the study of Internet Governance? How should scholars maintain neutrality or independence as a researcher of Internet Governance while also being an active participant or advocate for particular approaches in Internet Governance? Here, Dr. Derrick Cogburn and Dr. Milton Mueller both highlighted the role of participant and non-participant observation and how each benefits the study of Internet Governance by deepening knowledge on a substantive level, especially as it concerns how to collect and analyze incredibly voluminous data sets. Moderator Anriette Esterhuysen explained that as a nonacademic who is actively involved in Internet Governance, she finds the participation of academics indispensable and urged scholars to keep participating in multistakeholder Internet Governance processes.

Other questions centered around questions of power; the promise and perils of applying Internet governance best practices to emerging fields such as artificial intelligence; and the privatization of data that could prove useful and critical to much-needed research.   

Extended Q&A

Below our authors and editors answer some of the questions we were unable to get to during the event.

Q: Anat Ben-David has written about the obstacles for Internet research place by private platforms restricting researchers' access to data (e.g., Facebook withdrew the API for researchers in 2018). Previously it was possible to create an open archive of Web content. Do you address the need for policy to maintain an open archive of the Internet public sphere?

Dr. Francesca Musiani (co-editor and author): We have not specifically addressed the issue in the book (which is representative of several core theoretical/methodological issues of the field, but not exhaustive) however, the issue of preserving the Web and the Internet of the past, as a set of material/data for researchers and more broadly as a historical resource for humanity, is also an issue of Internet governance. I have discussed it in this English-language article http://frenchjournalformediaresearch.com/lodel-1.0/main/index.php?id=952 which provides an answer to your question in its second part ("Web archiving governance"). For the French speakers, if any, this open access book which I co-authored (https://books.openedition.org/oep/8713?lang=en) may also be of interest.

Q: Several IG scholars have proposed to move the conception of IG from "deliberating governance" to "doing governance". Will this impact to the conception of MS approach in the field?

Dr. Francesca Musiani (co-editor and author): I have been one of those researchers, most importantly by co-editing this 2016 special issue for the Internet Policy Review. In the editorial to this issue, Dima Epstein, Christian Katzenbach and I specifically address the issue of how multi-stakeholderism can be 'revisited' in light of the 'doing internet governance' approach (I briefly reprise this in my chapter for RIG). We say: "Several concepts brought in by the STS toolbox, as well as several fieldwork choices, can help unveiling a number of situated practices on, by and for the internet that arguably constitute a vital part of ‘doing internet governance’. In particular, they help enriching and revisiting the concept of multi-stakeholderism (Malcolm, 2008). For example, understanding IG through the lens of Michel Callon et al.’s ‘hybrid forums’ (2009) - entities meant to transform controversies into productive dialogue and bring about democracy - show the importance of actors’ positioning in subsequent decision-making. If the role of the private sector is more and more important in internet governance arrangements, as it is increasingly widely acknowledged, the technology-embedded nature of its intervention can be brought to the foreground by STS methods. Examining the relationship of internet users to content they put online or consume, to their devices and the values they embed, ‘does’ governance inasmuch as it reflects belonging and commitment to a set of norms and to a community in a broad sense, and reveals the interplay of issues of sovereignty, autonomy, and civil liberties (Elkin-Koren, 2012)."

The Internet Governance Lab would like to thank the book’s co-editors and authors, the Greater Washington DC Chapter of the Internet Society, MIT Press, and the Hewlett Foundation, whose generous support enabled the book to be made available as an open access publication.