Internet governance Lab Global Faculty Fellow Francesca Musiani co-edited a First Monday special issue

Our Global Faculty Fellow Francesca Musiani co-edited a special issue of First Monday. Musiani is the Deputy Director of the Center for Internet and Society of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), which she co-founded with Dr. Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay in 2019.

The issue’s title is ‘Infrastructure-embedded control, circumvention and sovereignty in the Russian Internet’. It is the result of almost two years of work with the team of the ResisTIC (Criticism and circumvention of digital borders in Russia) project. Experts around the world on the national Russian Internet (RuNet) contributed to the issue. The articles explore control and circumvention strategies embedded in the infrastructure of the RuNet, dialoguing with scholars on digital sovereignty, data, and infrastructure. You can access the issue in the link or check out the list of papers below:

• Infrastructure-embedded control, circumvention and sovereignty in the Russian Internet: An introduction, by Françoise Daucé and Francesca Musiani    

• Contextualizing sovereignty: A critical review of competing explanations of the Internet governance in the (so-called) Russian case, by Polina Kolozaridi and Dmitry Muravyov 

• Control by infrastructure: Political ambitions meet technical implementations in RuNet, by Ilona Stadnik        

• Controlling free expression “by infrastructure” in the Russian Internet: The consequences of RuNet sovereignization, by Liudmila Sivetc    

• Mapping the routes of the Internet for geopolitics: The case of Eastern Ukraine, by Kevin Limonier, Frédérick Douzet, Louis Pétiniaud, Loqman Salamatian, and Kave Salamatian

• The Telegram ban: How censorship “made in Russia” faces a global Internet, by Ksenia Ermoshina and Francesca Musiani    

• Codes of conduct for algorithmic news recommendation: The Yandex.News controversy in Russia, by Françoise Daucé and Benjamin Loveluck        

• ‘In Google we trust’? The Internet giant as a subject of contention and appropriation for the Russian state and civil society, by Olga Bronnikova and Anna Zaytseva        

• Social media and state repression: The case of VKontakte and the anti-garbage protest in Shies, in Far Northern Russia, by Perrine Poupin  

• “Free libraries for the free people”: How mass-literature “shadow” libraries circumvent digital barriers and redefine legality in contemporary Russia, by Bella Ostromooukhova