We are honored to be hosting and sponsoring this year’s internet governance ICA preconference: Internet Governance and Communication Beyond Borders, along with our co-sponsors ICA and the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (Giganet). Our conference will explore the most pressing and exciting issues in the field currently, drawing on expertise from leading global scholars.

Our preconference theme reflects ICA’s overarching theme for 2019, Communication Beyond Boundaries, and we explore this important topics from questions of interdisciplinarity within internet governance through to how the borders of sovereign nations and their laws are affecting cyberspace.

Our first panel looks at the geopolitics of internet governance, moderated by Samantha Bradshaw from the Oxford Internet Institute, before our Associate Director, Kenneth Merrill, leads a research jam session. The morning finishes with Faculty Director Derrick Cogburn leading a panel which explores the critical infrastructure issues influencing internet governance.

In the afternoon our focus shifts to how human rights are being affected by information control and digital influence, moderated by Eric Novotny, one of our Faculty Fellows, before our conference finishes with an exploration of how scholars are redefining the boundaries of internet governance, moderated by Dmitry Epstein, Chair of GigaNet.

To get live updates from the preconference, please follow the #NetGovBeyondBorders and the Internet Governance Lab on Twitter.

The full agenda and location details are listed below.

Preconference Details & Location

When: May 24, 2019: 9.00am - 4:30 pm

Where: Malsi Doyle and Michael Forman Theater, American University School of Communication (McKinley 201)

How to get to campus by public transport: Take the Metro Red Line to Tenleytown-AU , follow the signs to exit the metro on the left and walk down to pick up the blue route American University shuttle bus on 40th and Albermarle Sts NW. Get off at Kerwin Hall and follow the signs to McKinley.

Full Preconference Agenda

9:00am - 9:15am Introductions

Laura DeNardis, Faculty Director, the Internet Governance Lab and Professor, American University School of Communication
Dmitry Epstein, Chair, GigaNet and Assistant Professor of Communication and Public Policy, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

9:15am – 10:30am Panel I: The Geopolitics of Internet Governance

Moderator: Samantha Bradshaw, DPhil, the Oxford Internet Institute.

Aynne Kokas, "The New Cybersovereigns: Power, control, and Internet governance between China and the United States.”
Renee Marlin-Bennett, "Flow Power and the Governance of Information Online."
Aislinn McCann and Aaron Brantly, "A Healthy Internet: Modeling Internet Governance on the World Health Organization’s Successes and Failures."
Susan Aaronson, "Data is a Development Issue."
Conversation/Q&A

10:30am – 10:45am Coffee

10:45am – 11:00am Research Jam

Moderator: Kenneth Merrill, Associate Director, the Internet Governance Lab

Min Tang, “The Political Economy of the Huawei Indictment: Toward a reconceptualization of nation-states in Internet governance.”
Dmitry Kuznetsov, “ICANN’s ‘dot brand’ Communities: A critical discourse analysis of the new gTLD programme’s construction of DNS-appropriate communities.”
Wenting Yu, Chris Fei Shen, and Chen Min, “Governance of Social Media Data: Different focuses between government and Internet companies.”
Ilona Stadnik, “Internet Fragmentation or Internet Alignment: The case of Russia and ‘sovereign’ RUnet.”
Junbin Su, “Opening the Black-Box of News Recommendation Algorithms: Gatekeeping and its ethical concerns.”

11:00 – 12:15pm Panel II: Critical Infrastructures Unbounded

Moderator: Derrick Cogburn, Co-Director, the Internet Governance Lab and Professor, American University School of International Service

Milton Mueller and Brenden Kuerbis, "Is There One Internet, or Two? The Competition Between IPv6 and IPv4 and its Implications for Internet Governance."
Undrah Baasasnjav, “Stability and Security of International Domain Names.”
Corinne Cath, "The Technology We Choose to Create: Human Rights Advocacy and Anthropology in Internet Governance."
Farzaneh Badiei and Patricia Vargas, "A Jurisprudential Approach to Governments and Other Actors Attempts to Control the Internet Root Zone."
Conversation/Q&A

12:15pm – 1:15pm Lunch & Poster Session (School of International Service, Founders Room)

1:15pm - 2:30pm Panel III: Human Rights

Moderator: Eric Novotny, Hurst Senior Professorial Lecturer, American University School of International Service and Faculty Fellow, the Internet Governance Lab

Ksenia Ermoshina, Benjamin Loveluck and Francesca Musiani, "A market of black boxes: The Russian Internet industry of censorship and surveillance."
Aras Coskuntuncel, "The Privatization of Internet Governance as an Information Control Strategy in Turkey."
Emma Briant, "The Case of Cambridge Analytica: Governing Beyond Borders for a Global Digital Influence Industry."
Andrew Rens and Bryan Bello, "Don’t Think of Intelligence! The role of technological frames in regulating AI and the implications for the social production of knowledge."
Conversation/Q&A

2:30pm – 2:45pm Coffee

2:45pm – 4:00pm Panel IV: Boundaries of Internet Governance

Moderator: Dmitry Epstein, Vice-Chair, GigaNet and Assistant Professor of Communication & Public Policy, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Anna Loup and Dustin Phillips, "When Multi-Scalar Meets Intersectional Analysis: New ways of doing Internet access, infrastructure, and governance research, a case study of California’s Central Valley"
Maggie Clifford, Patricia Aufderheide and Aram Sinnreich, "Access Shrugged: Declining Engagement with Open-Source and Open-Access Approaches."
Efrat Daskal, "Broadening the boundaries of the field: Personal Internet Governance?"
Martha Fuentes-Bautista, Becky Lentz and Rafael Zanatta, "Assessing Engaged Learning on Data Protection: Towards a Social Justice Perspective on Internet Governance Pedagogy"
Conversation/Q&A

4:00 – 4:30pm Concluding Remarks & Reception