Date/Time: Monday, January 31, 4:00 - 5:15p

Location: 301 College Ave., Seminar Room

Abstract:
Governance is usually understood as the efforts of nation states and traditional political structures to govern.  In the case of Internet governance, sovereign nations perform functions such as intellectual property enforcement, antitrust oversight, and access regulation.  Sovereign governments also unfortunately use content filtering techniques for surveillance and censorship of citizens. These issues are a critical part of information policy, but sometimes overlook the governance sinews already permeating the Internet's protocological and material architecture. The day is long past when governments were the primary actors securing rights such as freedom of expression and individual privacy.  Information policy is established through technical design, new global institutional forms, and private ordering. Examples include the privacy policies of social media companies, traffic prioritization via service provider peering agreements, and the mediation of censorship requests by search engine companies. This privatization of Internet governance often takes place at deep levels of technical architecture. One of these areas is the design of Internet protocols, the blueprints that enable interoperability among information technologies.  Technical protocols are not external to politics and culture, but deeply embed the values that ultimately determine both innovation policy and civil liberties online. This lecture will examine the political implications of protocols and the basis on which private standards-setting institutions have the legitimacy to make design choices that determine global trade policy, the pace of innovation, and Internet freedom. 

Bio:
Dr. Laura DeNardis is a Lecturer at Yale Law School and the Executive Director of the Yale Information Society Project, an academic think tank that studies the implications of the Internet and new information technologies for law and society.  She is an Internet governance scholar whose research addresses information policy concerns such as protocol design, critical Internet resources, intellectual property rights, access policies, and freedom of expression online.  Her books include Opening Standards:  the Global Politics of Interoperability (MIT Press 2011), Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance (MIT Press 2009), and Information Technology in Theory (Thompson 2007 with Pelin Aksoy).  DeNardis has been invited to present her research at universities such as Oxford, Columbia, Princeton, Harvard Law School, Penn, and McGill and in international venues such as the Paris Interoperability Workshop, the Open Forum Academy in Brussels, the Future of the Internet conference in Geneva, and United Nations Internet Governance Forums in Greece, India, Lithuania, and Brazil.  DeNardis was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale Law School and received a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Virginia Tech, a Master of Engineering degree in OR&IE from Cornell University, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Engineering Science from Dartmouth.

More information about Laura DeNardis is available here: http://lauradenardis.org

For more information, please contact Corinne Russell.

1/17/11 Corinne