The Internet is now a key part of everyday life across the developed world, and growing rapidly across developing countries. This Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the latest research on Internet governance, written by the leading scholars in the field. With an international focus, it features contributions from lawyers, economists and political scientists across North America, Europe and Australia. They adopt a broad multidisciplinary perspective, taking in law, economics, political science, international relations, and communications studies. Thought-provoking chapters cover topics such as ICANN, the Internet Governance Forum, grassroots activism, innovation, human rights, privacy in social networks, and network neutrality. Being a forward-looking guide for the next decade, this Research Handbook will strongly appeal to scholars and graduate students in the social sciences studying and researching Internet governance, political scientists, economists, lawyers and computer scientists working on governance issues, as well as regulators and policymakers responsible for Internet governance in national governments and intergovernmental organisations.

This comprehensive and innovative Research Handbook tackles the pressing issues confronting us at the dawn of the global network society, including freedom of speech, government transparency and the digital divide. Engaging with controversial problems of public policy including freedom of expression, copyright and information inequality, the Research Handbook on Information Policy offers a well-rounded exploration of the history and future of this vital field.

E-government is an increasingly well-established and wide-ranging field, in which there has been an explosion of new technologies, applications, and data resulting in new challenges and opportunities for e-government research and practice. This Research Handbook advances research in the field of e-government by first recognizing its roots and documenting its growth and progress. It investigates the advent and implications of new technologies, and structures the content around core topics of service, management, engagement and access. Two additional sections examine the role of e-government in developing countries and smart cities.

Internet Studies has been one of the most dynamic and rapidly expanding interdisciplinary fields to emerge over the last decade. The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies has been designed to provide a valuable resource for academics and students in this area, bringing together leading scholarly perspectives on how the Internet has been studied and how the research agenda should be pursued in the future. The Handbook aims to focus on Internet Studies as an emerging field, each chapter seeking to provide a synthesis and critical assessment of the research in a particular area. Topics covered include social perspectives on the technology of the Internet, its role in everyday life and work, implications for communication, power, and influence, and the governance and regulation of the Internet. The Handbook is a landmark in this new interdisciplinary field, not only helping to strengthen research on the key questions, but also shape research, policy, and practice across many disciplines that are finding the Internet and its political, economic, cultural, and other societal implications increasingly central to their own key areas of inquiry.

This revised and expanded edition of the Research Handbook on International Law and Cyberspace brings together leading scholars and practitioners to examine how international legal rules, concepts and principles apply to cyberspace and the activities occurring within it. In doing so, contributors highlight the difficulties in applying international law to cyberspace, assess the regulatory efficacy of these rules and, where necessary, suggest adjustments and revisions.

Internet research spans many disciplines. From the computer or information s- ences, through engineering, and to social sciences, humanities and the arts, almost all of our disciplines have made contributions to internet research, whether in the effort to understand the effect of the internet on their area of study, or to investigate the social and political changes related to the internet, or to design and develop so- ware and hardware for the network. The possibility and extent of contributions of internet research vary across disciplines, as do the purposes, methods, and outcomes. Even the epistemological underpinnings differ widely. The internet, then, does not have a discipline of study for itself: It is a ?eld for research (Baym, 2005), an open environment that simultaneously supports many approaches and techniques not otherwise commensurable with each other. There are, of course, some inhibitions that limit explorations in this ?eld: research ethics, disciplinary conventions, local and national norms, customs, laws, borders, and so on. Yet these limits on the int- net as a ?eld for research have not prevented the rapid expansion and exploration of the internet. After nearly two decades of research and scholarship, the limits are a positive contribution, providing bases for discussion and interrogation of the contexts of our research, making internet research better for all. These ‘limits,’ challenges that constrain the theoretically limitless space for internet research, create boundaries that give de?nition to the ?eld and provide us with a particular topography that enables research and investigation.

Scholars from a range of disciplines discuss research methods, theories, and conceptual approaches in the study of internet governance. The design and governance of the internet has become one of the most pressing geopolitical issues of our era. The stability of the economy, democracy, and the public sphere are wholly dependent on the stability and security of the internet. Revelations about election hacking, facial recognition technology, and government surveillance have gotten the public's attention and made clear the need for scholarly research that examines internet governance both empirically and conceptually. In this volume, scholars from a range of disciplines consider research methods, theories, and conceptual approaches in the study of internet governance.