SOAS MA Thesis | The Return of Cyberspace: Towards a Digital Architecture for Internet Governance
The thesis submits that current modalities of Internet governance are failing because they are predicated on political ideas, economic systems and legal structures which no longer reflect twenty-first century existence. The paper advances this argument in four main ways.
The first is by examining the ideology and cartographic technology of the Westphalian nation-state and the challenge posed to its underlying logic by the spatial and multi-jurisdictional nature of cyberspace.
The thesis concludes by submitting that the future systems of Internet governance will seek legitimacy by providing services to the billions of users of cyberspace, and will be constructed inside the network, rather than imposed externally from above and without.
Second, the paper interrogates the legal, ethical and philosophical basis of the post World War II system of international relations, submitting that its founding principles are being superseded by the interrelated forces of globalization, privatization and programming code. At the same time the logic of state competition is resulting in Internet fragmentation, surveillance, censorship, information subversion and ‘norm-regression’ (Deibert, 2012).
Thirdly, the thesis demonstrates that current multistakeholder approaches to Internet governance are lacking in democratic accountability, effectiveness and legitimacy, often serving to reify networks of private-capital and state power in the developed and developing world.
The thesis concludes by submitting that the future systems of Internet governance will seek legitimacy by providing services to the billions of users of cyberspace, and will be constructed inside the network, rather than imposed externally from above and without.
Read the full thesis on Academia here.
