How to control the Internet: Comparative political implications of the Internet's engineering

Authors

  • Steven Lloyd Wilson University of Wisconsin-Madison

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v20i2.5228

Keywords:

Internet, Cross-Country, Democratization, Authoritarian

Abstract

The spread of the Internet has had a profound impact on the social sciences, but understanding of how the engineering realities of the Internet’s construction shape its political effects still lags. This article presents a framework and rich examples from multiple countries in order to describe how national differences in the implementation of the Internet cause different strategic calculations by political actors. This paper’s goal is to provide a starting point for social scientists to treat the Internet as a strategic construction of regime and people, rather than a technical black box.

Author Biography

Steven Lloyd Wilson, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Steven Wilson is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work specializes on the effects of the Internet on authoritarian regimes, with a particular focus on the states of the former Soviet Bloc.

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Published

2015-01-20

How to Cite

Wilson, S. L. (2015). How to control the Internet: Comparative political implications of the Internet’s engineering. First Monday, 20(2). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v20i2.5228