Wir freuen uns sehr, Dr. Francesca Musiani begrüßen zu dürfen, die einen Vortrag über die Governance des Internets und die Art und Weise, wie seine Infrastrukturen als Ansammlungen von Macht und Kontrolle funktionieren, halten wird. Dieser Vortrag eröffnet das neue Masterprogramm Digital Society. für weitere Informationen über das Programm.

Digital Society Opening lecture by Dr. Francesca Musiani

Infrastructures as Power in the Internet Governance Ecosystem

Associate Research Professor and Deputy Director, Centre Internet et Société, CNRS, Paris

Internet governance can be understood as a normative « system of systems » in which more classical political tools such as legal instruments and parliamentary votes are combined with other instruments of power such as the market, the informal norms established by specific online communities, and technical design choices. This talk will provide an introduction to this ecosystem, with a specific attention paid to infrastructures as instruments of governance.

The first part of the talk will define Internet governance as the administration and design of the technologies that keep the Internet operational, and as the enactment of policy around these technologies. This governance is becoming one of the most pressing geopolitical issues of the contemporary era, linked to several public policy concerns such as personal privacy, economic stability, national security, freedom of expression, and digital equality; it involves high economic stakes and prominent media treatment of several «digital» controversies.

The second part of the talk will address how, within this plurality of co-existing norms governing the internet, arrangements of technical architecture and infrastructure are also arrangements of power and control (DeNardis & Musiani, 2016), a perspective explored by a sub-field of STS called infrastructure studies. Indeed, the design of the “plumbing” of the Internet (Musiani, 2012), underlying practices, uses and exchanges in a networked system, informs its adoption and (re)appropriation by users, its regulation, and its organizational forms. The example of decentralised architectures, understood by different actors as a possible «remedy» or alternative to the centralized monopolies of today’s digital world, will illustrate the relevance of looking at architecture and infrastructure as arrangements of power and control.

In its third and final part, this talk will address the extent to which the «infrastructure studies» perspective is nowadays useful to examine under-explored facets of topics related to Internet governance, such as digital sovereignty, content moderation and digital labor.