governance

We are pleased to present five articles focusing on substantive public policy issues arising from widespread use of the Internet.

Welcome to the third issue of Policy & Internet for 2010. We are pleased to present five articles focusing on substantive public policy issues arising from widespread use of the Internet: regulation of trade in virtual goods; development of electronic government in Korea; online policy discourse in UK elections; regulatory models for broadband technologies in the US; and alternative governance frameworks for open ICT standards. Three of the articles are the first to be published from the highly successful conference ‘Internet, Politics and Policy’ held by the journal in Oxford, 16th-17th September 2010. You may access any of the articles below at no charge. Helen Margetts: Editorial Vili Lehdonvirta and Perttu Virtanen: A New Frontier in Digital Content Policy: Case Studies in the Regulation of Virtual Goods and Artificial Scarcity Joon Hyoung Lim: Digital Divides in Urban E-Government in South Korea: Exploring Differences in Municipalities’ Use of the Internet for Environmental Governance Darren G. Lilleker and Nigel A. Jackson: Towards a More Participatory Style of Election Campaigning: The Impact of Web 2.0 on the UK 2010 General Election Michael J. Santorelli: Regulatory Federalism in the Age of Broadband: A U.S. Perspective Laura DeNardis: E-Governance Policies for Interoperability and Open Standards

What he sees at stake is power because of the permanent threat of our activities are being watched by others—not necessarily now but possibly even in the future—can result in altering our behaviour today.

Our two-day conference is coming to a close with a keynote by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger who is soon to be joining the faculty of the Oxford Internet Institute as Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation. Viktor talked about the theme of his recent book “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age” (a webcast of this keynote will be available soon on the OII website but you can also listen to a previous talk here). It touches on many of the recent debates about information that has been published on the web in some context and which might suddenly come back to us in a completely different context, e.g. when applying for a job and being confronted with some drunken picture of us obtained from Facebook. Viktor puts that into a broad perspective, contrasting the two themes of “forgetting” and “remembering”. He convincingly argues how for most of human history, forgetting has been the default. This state of affairs has experienced quite a dramatic change with the advances of the computer technology, data storage and information retrieval technologies available on a global information infrastructure.  Now remembering is the default as most of the information stored digitally is available forever and in multiple places. What he sees at stake is power because of the permanent threat of our activities are being watched by others—not necessarily now but possibly even in the future—can result in altering our behaviour today. What is more, he says that without forgetting it is hard for us to forgive as we deny us and others the possibility to change. No matter to what degree you are prepared to follow the argument, the most intriguing question is how the current state of remembering could be changed to forgetting. Viktor discusses a number of ideas that pose no real solution: privacy rights – don’t go very far in changing actual behaviour information ecology – the idea to store only as much…

We are pleased to present six articles which investigate the role of the Internet in a wide range of policy processes and sectors.

Welcome to the second issue of Policy & Internet for 2010! We are pleased to present six articles which investigate the role of the Internet in a wide range of policy processes and sectors: agenda setting in online and traditional media; environmental policy networks; online deliberation on climate change; data protection and privacy; net neutrality; and digital inclusion/exclusion. You may access any of the articles below at no charge. Helen Margetts: Editorial Ben Sayre, Leticia Bode, Dhavan Shah, Dave Wilcox, and Chirag Shah: Agenda Setting in a Digital Age: Tracking Attention to California Proposition 8 in Social Media, Online News and Conventional News Kathleen McNutt and Adam Wellstead: Virtual Policy Networks in Forestry and Climate Change in the U.S. and Canada: Government Nodality, Internationalisation and Actor Complexity Julien Talpin and Stéphanie Wojcik: Deliberating Environmental Policy Issues: Comparing the Learning Potential of Online and Face-To-Face Discussions on Climate Change Andrew A. Adams, Kiyoshi Murata, and Yohko Orito: The Development of Japanese Data Protection Scott Jordan: The Application of Net Neutrality to Wireless Networks Based on Network Architecture Alison Powell, Amelia Bryne, and Dharma Dailey: The Essential Internet: Digital Exclusion in Low-Income American Communities