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The Global War for Internet Governance. By Laura DeNardis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Pp. viii+288. $38.
As a term and as a topic of debate and analysis, "internet governance" went mainstream in 2013. The Edward Snowden revelations and growing concerns about cybersecurity, censorship, and social media regulation put what had once been a narrow, technical, and specialized area of discourse into the headlines.
Laura DeNardis's Global War for Internet Governance is an excellent introduction to the topic, though it suffers from a bad choice of title. Her topic is not really a global "war" over the governance of the internet, which implies an analysis of politics, events, and movements. It is, rather, about the proper way to conceptualize what "governing" the internet-a distributed, transnational infrastructure for communication and information- actually means. As she says in the first chapter (p. 2), "The escalation of Internet control debates into the...