The AU Internet Governance Lab is hosting and sponsoring the International Communication Association (ICA) Preconference “Internet Governance and Communication Beyond Boundaries” on Friday, May 24, 2019 in Washington, DC. The event is co-sponsored by the ICA Communication and Technology Division; the ICA Communication Law and Policy Division; and the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet). A Call for Extended Abstracts is open through February 11, 2019.

Contemporary questions about the information society are inseparable from questions of governance of the underlying infrastructures, the logic of information flows, and its uses at the edges. The scope of questions under the general umbrella of Internet governance is thus extremely broad, but at the same time vaguely defined. In the spirit of this year’s ICA conference theme, this event will discuss the issue of boundaries in Internet governance, both as a substantive topic of research and as a reflexive exercise for Internet governance as a research domain.

Substantively, within Internet governance, boundaries have been traditionally an important area of research, starting with questions of sovereignty and jurisdiction in cyberspace, reaching to the exploration of boundaries of the technical, legal, social, and political decision-making with constitutive effects on the Internet. As a field of study, Internet governance has been debating its disciplinary boundaries as well as the scope of research questions that can come under this broad label.

Internet Governance and Communication Beyond Boundaries

ICA Pre-Conference  

24 May 2019 

Malsi Doyle and Michael Forman Theater (MCK 201)
American University School of Communication
4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW
Washington, DC, USA 

Hosted and sponsored by
The Internet Governance Lab at American University

Co-sponsored by
ICA Communication and Technology Division
ICA Communication Law and Policy Division
Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet)

Agenda

9:00 - 9:15am Introductions
- Laura DeNardis, Faculty Director, the Internet Governance Lab and Professor, American University School of Communication (5 min)
- Dmitry Epstein, Vice-Chair, GigaNet and Assistant Professor of Communication and Public Policy, The Hewbrew University of Jerusalem (10 min)

9:15 - 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.” (15 min)
- Renee Marlin-Bennett, "Flow Power and the Governance of Information Online." (15 min)
- Aislinn McCann and Aaron Brantly, "A Healthy Internet: Modeling Internet Governance on the World Health Organization’s Successes and Failures." (15 min)
- Susan Aaronson, "Data is a Development Issue." (15 min)
- Conversation/Q&A (15min)

10:30 - 10:45am Coffee

10:45 - 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.” (2 min)
- Dmitry Kuznetsov, “ICANN’s ‘dot brand’ Communities: A critical discourse analysis of the new gTLD programme’s construction of DNS-appropriate communities.” (2 min)
- Wenting Yu, Chris Fei Shen, and Chen Min, “Governance of Social Media Data: Different focuses between government and Internet companies.” (2 min)
- Ilona Stadnik, “Internet Fragmentation or Internet Alignment: The case of Russia and ‘sovereign’ RUnet.” (2 min)

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." (15 min)
- Undrah Baasasnjav, “Stability and Security of International Domain Names.” (15 min)
- Corinne Cath, "The Technology We Choose to Create: Human Rights Advocacy and Anthropology in Internet Governance." (15 min)
- Farzaneh Badiei and Patricia Vargas, "A Jurisprudential Approach to Governments and Other Actors Attempts to Control the Internet Root Zone." (15 min)
- Conversation/Q&A (15min)

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

1:15 - 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." (15 min)
- Aras Coskuntuncel, "The Privatization of Internet Governance as an Information Control Strategy in Turkey." (15 min)
- Emma Briant, "The Case of Cambridge Analytica: Governing Beyond Borders for a Global Digital Influence Industry." (15 min)
- 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." (15 min)
- Conversation/Q&A (15min)

2:30 - 2:45pm Coffee

2:45 - 4:00pm Panel IV: Boundaries of Internet Governacne
Moderator: Dmitry Epstein, Vice-Chair, GigaNet and Assistant Professor of Communication & Public Policy, The Hewbrew 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" (15 min)
- Maggie Clifford, Patricia Aufderheide and Aram Sinnreich, "Access Shrugged: Declining Engagement with Open-Source and Open-Access Approaches." (15 min)
- Efrat Daskal, "Broadening the boundaries of the field: Personal Internet Governance?" (15 min)
- Martha Fuentes-Bautista, Becky Lentz and Rafael Zanatta, "Assessing Engaged Learning on Data Protection: Towards a Social Justice Perspective on Internet Governance Pedagogy" (15 min)
- Conversation/Q&A (15min)

4:00 - 4:30pm Concluding Remarks