This title lifts the lid on internet governance within standards bodies with detailed insight into a world which, although highly technical, very much affects the way in which citizens live and work. It details the way in which citizens, states, companies, and engineers interact within standards bodies and seek to steer policy adoption.

A groundbreaking study of one of the most crucial yet least understood issues of the twenty-first century: the governance of the Internet and its content

The book addresses representation of the public interest in Internet standard developing organisations (SDOs). Much of the existing literature on Internet governance focuses on international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The literature covering standard developing organisations has to date focused on organisational aspects. This book breaks new ground with investigation of standard development within SDO fora. Case studies centre on standards relating to privacy and security, mobile communications, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and copyright. The book lifts the lid on internet standard setting with detailed insight into a world which, although highly technical, very much affects the way in which citizens live and work on a daily basis. In doing this it adds significantly to the trajectory of research on Internet standards and SDOs that explore the relationship between politics and protocols. The analysis contributes to academic debates on democracy and the internet, global self-regulation and civil society, and international decision-making processes in unstructured environments. The book advances work on the Multiple Streams Framework (MS) by applying it to decision-making in non-state environments, namely SDOs which have long been dominated by private actors. The book is aimed at academic audiences in political science, computer science communications and science and technology studies as well as representatives from civil society, the civil service, government, engineers and experts working within SDO fora. It will also be accessible to students at the postgraduate and undergraduate levels.

The book begins with an analysis of the technological infrastructure environment and of the manifold regulatory theories developed in the Internet Governance context. Based on this foundation the transnational normative ecosystem is outlined, followed by a detailed discussion of the substantive Internet Governance principles (such as legitimacy, participation, transparency, accountability). These considerations lead to the presentation of relevant international legal concepts (duty of co-operation, global public goods, shared spaces, due diligence, State responsibility) that merit more attention. The outlook proposes potential approaches for improving the future of the Internet Governance design.

The coronavirus pandemic that has rocked China since December 2019 has posed a gruelling test for the resilience of the country's national economy. Now, as China emerges from its Covid-induced "recession", it feels like the worst is behind it. How did China manage to come out almost unscathed from the worst crisis in over a century? This Report examines how China designed and implemented its post-Covid recovery strategy, focussing on both the internal and external challenges the country had to face over the short- and medium-run. The book offers a comprehensive argument suggesting that, despite China having lost economic and political capital during the crisis, Beijing seems to have been strengthened by the "pandemic test", thus becoming an even more challenging "partner, competitor and rival" for Western countries.

John Mathiason tells the story of the internet governance, where the linkage between technology, information, individuals, old regulatory regimes and new approaches have led to a great experiment, what a volume produced by the United Nations Information and Communications Technology Task Force called "A Grand Collaboration".