Books in the Information Revolution and Global Politics series

What are the global implications of the looming shortage of Internet addresses and the slow deployment of the new IPv6 protocol designed to solve this problem?

Experts examine censorship, surveillance, and resistance across Asia, from China and India to Malaysia and the Philippines.

Experts examine censorship, surveillance, and resistance across Asia, from China and India to Malaysia and the Philippines.

How institutions for Internet governance are emerging from the tension between the territorially bound nation-state and a transnational network society.When the prevailing system of governing divides the planet into mutually exclusive territorial monopolies of force, what institutions can govern the Internet, with its transnational scope, boundless scale, and distributed control? Given filtering/censorship by states and concerns over national cybersecurity, it is often assumed that the Internet will inevitably be subordinated to the traditional system of nation-states. In Networks and States, Milton Mueller counters this, showing how Internet governance poses novel and fascinating governance issues that give rise to a global politics and new transnational institutions. Drawing on theories of networked governance, Mueller provides a broad overview of Internet governance from the formation of ICANN to the clash at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the formation of the Internet Governance Forum, the global assault on peer-to-peer file sharing, and the rise of national-level Internet control and security concerns. Internet governance has become a source of conflict in international relations. Networks and States explores the important role that emerging transnational institutions could play in fostering global governance of communication-information policy.

The case for a smarter "prosumer law" approach to Internet regulation that would better protect online innovation, public safety, and fundamental democratic rights.

An examination of how the availability of low-end information and communication technology has provided a basis for the emergence of a working-class network society in China.The idea of the "e;digital divide,"e; the great social division between information haves and have-nots, has dominated policy debates and scholarly analysis since the 1990s. In Working-Class Network Society, Jack Linchuan Qiu describes a more complex social and technological reality in a newly mobile, urbanizing China. Qiu argues that as inexpensive Internet and mobile phone services become available and are closely integrated with the everyday work and life of low-income communities, they provide a critical seedbed for the emergence of a new working class of "e;network labor"e; crucial to China's economic boom. Between the haves and have-nots, writes Qiu, are the information "e;have-less"e;: migrants, laid-off workers, micro-entrepreneurs, retirees, youth, and others, increasingly connected by cybercafes, prepaid service, and used mobile phones. A process of class formation has begun that has important implications for working-class network society in China and beyond. Qiu brings class back into the scholarly discussion, not as a secondary factor but as an essential dimension in our understanding of communication technology as it is shaped in the vast, industrializing society of China. Basing his analysis on his more than five years of empirical research conducted in twenty cities, Qiu examines technology and class, networked connectivity and public policy, in the context of massive urban reforms that affect the new working class disproportionately. The transformation of Chinese society, writes Qiu, is emblematic of the new technosocial reality emerging in much of the Global South.