Ghosts, Vampires, and the Global Shaping of Internet Policy

This chapter explores the complex negotiation of Internet policies in different national contexts—and how that relates to borders and boundaries of new technologies. It commences an inquiry into competing discourses and asks how those competing discourses interact with civil society and other interests in local, regional, and transnational debates about the meaning and future architecture of the Internet. The chapter has its origins in a conference on boundaries at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, concerned with transcending the all-too-human, fleeting, but consequential lines that divide polities and territories. My talk there was titled “Of Ghosts and Vampires: Rethinking Information Flow.” It contained a formulation designed to capture global trends, global thinking, as the Internet increasingly became a contested area for defining and limiting power. The point was finding a way to reinvent rhetorical characterizations that, themselves, affect the implementation of technologies. These characterizations on a broad scale challenge forms of national regulation or, to the contrary, helped to confirm the state.