Francesca Musiani

INVESTIGATING EVOLVING DISCOURSES ON HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE DIGITAL AGE Emerging Norms and Policy Challenges

This article investigates how human rights in the digital age can be considered as an overall frame accommodating fundamental rights and freedoms that relate to communication processes, and related challenges, in societies worldwide. The article brings together different disciplinary backgrounds (communication studies, linguistics and sociology of networks) and complementary empirical analyses of the content, structure and relevance of evolving discourses concerning human rights in the digital age. In doing so, the article defines and adopts a constructivist and communicative approach to the study of world politics, and details its relevance in order to assess the evolution of normative standards concerning communication as a human right in the transnational context.

End-to-End Encrypted Messaging Protocols: An Overview

This paper aims at giving an overview of the different core protocols used for decentralized chat and email-oriented services. This work is part of a survey of 30 projects focused on decentralized and/or end-to-end encrypted internet messaging, currently conducted in the early stages of the H2020 CAPS project NEXTLEAP.

Practice, Plurality, Performativity, and Plumbing: Internet Governance Research Meets Science and Technology Studies

Recent scholarship provides the opportunity for an assessment of the underexplored but promising marriage between science and technology studies (STS) and Internet governance (IG) research. This article seeks to provide such an assessment by reviewing and discussing, in particular, three volumes: Laura DeNardis’s The Global War for Internet Governance (2014, Yale University Press), The Power of Networks: Organizing the Global Politics of the Internet by Mikkel Flyverbom (2011, Edward Elgar Publishing), and Governance, Regulations and Powers on the Internet edited by Eric Brousseau, Meryem Marzouki, and Cécile Méadel (2012, Cambridge University Press). Approaching IG through an STS lens, these authors bring to the fore a number of related issues that political and legal sciences have addressed only incompletely so far, but are crucial to understand today’s governance of the Internet as a complex sociotechnical system of systems. In their research, STS scholars of IG highlight the day-to-day, mundane practices that constitute IG; the plurality and “networkedness” of hybrid devices and arrangements that populate, shape, and define IG processes; the performative function of these arrangements vis-à-vis the virtual, yet very material, worlds they seek to regulate; the invisibility, pervasiveness, and agency of infrastructure.

Governance by Infrastructure

Injured victims of a Hamas-planned suicide bombing in Jerusalem were awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation from Iran in a 2014 US court action because of the Iranian government’s support of Hamas. As part of a decade-long effort to collect damages, the plaintiffs asked the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to seize the country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) of Iran, as well as North Korea and Syria, and turn them over to the plaintiffs. For a variety of technical, political, and legal reasons, ICANN pushed back against “seizing” ccTLDs and handing them over as compensation in a civil lawsuit (ICANN, 2014).

Net Neutrality from a Public Sphere Perspective

The Internet impacts social communication and the public sphere, and this impact has consequences for the political shape of the communication order—therefore, for society as a whole. One important question in this regard is which regulatory framework is being developed for the Internet, and how this framework enables and at the same time restricts communication in the public sphere. Net neutrality is at the very core of this question: distribution channels can be used as a means to discriminate, control, and prevent communication. In other words, content and user behavior can be controlled through the architecture of the physical layer and the “code” layer of the Internet. The discussion on net neutrality touches fundamental values (public interest, freedom of expression, freedom of the media, and free flow of information), that communications policy authorities in liberal democracies frequently appeal to in order to legitimize their interventions in media systems. The implementation of these values, from a normative point of view, is seen as the precondition for media to create the public sphere—be it online or offline—and thus fulfill its function in society (Napoli 2001).

Avant-garde Digital Movement or “Digital Sublime” Rhetoric?

With 25.5 % of voices obtained at the 2013 parliamentary elections in Italy, the MoVimento 5 Stelle (M5S or Five Star Movement) has become a central actor of Italian politics. The Movement relies to a large extent on a vision of Internet-driven and -based direct democracy; as such, social media have been the main organizational tools behind its rise of the past few years. At the same time, it is argued that the power of networking, the allegedly egalitarian approach to public debate, and the horizontality of relations typical of social media are not, in fact, the backbone of the Movement, but a primarily discursive device destined to hide the importance of much more “traditional” political instruments of hierarchical authority and opaque management of financial flows, and to legitimize the amateurism of the movement along with its anti-political drive. This chapter provides a portrait of the digital and social “vision” posited by the Movement—its practical, organizational consequences alongside its narrative(s). It aims at showing how the different components of this vision all contribute to the M5S’s status of new force to be reckoned with in the Italian political space—not always, and maybe not primarily, for the reasons the Movement itself provides.

Standardizing by Running Code: The Signal Protocol and De Facto Standardization in End-to-End Encrypted Messaging

In the wake of the Snowden revelations, encryption of communications at a large scale and in a ‘usable’ manner has become a matter of public concern. This turning of encryption into a ‘political’ issue, coupled with seminal secure messaging protocols such as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and OTR (Off-the-Record Messaging) starting to show their age in terms of security and usability, has led to renewed efforts by the cryptography community (in particular by academic and free software colectives) to create next-generation secure messaging protocols. One of the leading motivations behind this effort consisted to facilitate key exchange and key verification process, previously identified as the main obstacles to the mass adoption of encryption (Whitten & Tygar, 1999). The most advanced and popular of these next generation protocols is currently the Signal Protocol (formerly Axolotl, firstly introduced in Signal and adopted or forked by other instant messaging applications, ranging from WhatsApp and Wire to Matrix and Conversations). While the Signal protocol is widely adopted and considered as an improvement over both OTR and PGP, it remains officially unstandardized, even though there is an informal draft elaborated towards that goal by the protocol’s creators, Trevor Perrin and Moxie Marlinspike. This paper analyses the reasons behind this absence of official standardization and explores how and why, in parallel, a de facto standardization process is happening in the field of end-to-end encrypted messaging that mostly revolves around the development and adoption of the Signal protocol. Drawing from an ongoing three-year investigation, from an STS perspective, of end-to-end encrypted messaging, we seek to unveil the ‘subtle’ processes that make the Signal protocol a quasi-standard. In its conclusions, the paper seeks to comment on the governance implications of this quasi-standardization process, both for the end-to-end encrypted messaging field and for the main existing Internet governance standardization bodies, such as the IETF.

Alternative Technologies as Alternative Institutions: The Case of the Domain Name System

Late 2010, WikiLeaks makes thousands of secret US diplomatic cables public, losing a few days later its web hosting company and the wikileaks. org domain. Discussions about a “new competing root-server,” able to rival the one administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), soon start populating the Web, prompted by well-known Internet “anarchist” Peter Sunde. “The heart of DNS problems aren’t (sic) with ICANN. It’s with the governments and companies which can control ICANN. The system … is centralized,” he remarks (“ICANN Alternative,” 2015). An alternative domain name registry is envisaged, a decentralized, peer-to-peer (P2P) system in which volunteer users would each run a portion of the Domain Name System (DNS) on their own computers, so that any domain that would be made temporarily inaccessible, because of seizures or blockings, may still be accessible on the alternative registry. Instead of simply adding a number of DNS options to the ones already accepted and administrated by ICANN, this project would supersede the main DNS governance institution—in favor of a distributed, user infrastructure-based model.

Net Neutrality and Communication Research The Implications of Internet Infrastructure for the Public Sphere

The principle of net neutrality posits that packets circulating within the Internet should be treated equally, regardless of content, platform, source, recipient, or service. This chapter explores the implications of the net neutrality debate for communication research and the public sphere. First, the divergent disciplinary contexts of net neutrality-related research are introduced. Then, we adopt a public sphere framework to discuss areas of net neutrality that are relevant for communication studies, and the contributions of communication scholarship to their analysis are highlighted. Peter Dahlgren’s three-dimensional framework—structure, representation, and interaction—serves as an entry point into the field.