Demands for a more democratic, transparent and accountable management of theinternet were strong when preparing for the World Summit on the Information Society Review(WSIS Review), held in 2015. Partly in response to criticism, the United States initiated aprocess for transferring responsibility...

Cryptoparties (CPs) are a global movement of forums where citizens can come to learn how to improve their digital privacy and security. The present paper is one of the few empirical studies on CPs and is based on participant observation of three CPs. I demonstrate that the organisers of CPs...

How do we come to trust, use and govern virtual private networks (VPNs)? How do these objects of the internet tack back and forth between metaphor and technical processes as they garner usership and critique? This paper aims to answer these questions by considering VPNs as boundary objects. We...

This paper studies the efficacy of the Reddit’s quarantine, increasingly implemented in the platform as a means of restricting and reducing misogynistic and other hateful material. Using the case studies of r/TheRedPill and r/Braincels, the paper argues the quarantine successfully cordoned off...

Online platforms are considered as very powerful economic agents often tending to obtain oligopolistic or even monopolistic positions in the market. In this respect, the liability of platform operators has been constantly discussed among scholars. The sharpest issue in this respect is whether...

The internet is the digital reincarnation of a Greek agora or a Roman forum. It works as a "place" for public and private life. As such, it requires reliable, trustful rules to govern the daily routine of its visitors/users. The governance of the internet has gone through a significant (if not...

Over the last decade, digital sovereignty has become a central element in policy discourses on digital issues. Although it has become popular in both centralised/authoritarian and democratic countries alike, the concept remains highly contested. After investigating the challenges to sovereignty...

The European Union (EU) has, with increasing frequency, outlined an intention to strengthen its "digital sovereignty" as a basis for safeguarding European values in the digital age. Yet, uncertainty remains as to how the term should be defined, undermining efforts to assess the success of the...

Facing the fragmentation of digital space in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, this article considers regulatory models available to avoid the balkanisation of the internet. Considering government-led surveillance in particular, available strategies are investigated to create a...

Google Scholar has become an important player in the scholarly economy. Whereas typical academic publishers sell bibliometrics, analytics and ranking products, Alphabet, through Google Scholar, provides "free" tools for academic search and scholarly evaluation that have made it central to...