Suchergebnisse

The growth and health of our digital economies and societies depend on the core protocols and infrastructure of the Internet. This technical and logical substructure of our digital existence is now in need of protection against unwarranted interference in order to sustain the growth and the integrity of the global Internet. The Internet's key protocols and infrastructure can be considered a global public good that provides benefits to everyone in the world. Countering the growing state interference with this 'public core of the Internet' requires a new international agenda for Internet governance that departs from the notion of a global public good. Core ingredients of this strategy are: - To establish and disseminate an international norm stipulating that the Internet's public core - its main protocols and infrastructure- should be considered a neutral zone, safeguarded against unwarranted intervention by governments. - To advocate efforts to clearly differentiate at the national and international level between Internet security (security of the Internet infrastructure) and national security (security through the Internet). - To broaden the arena for cyber diplomacy to include new coalitions of states (including the so called 'swing states') and private companies, including the large Internet companies as well as Internet intermediaries such as Internet Service Providers.

AbstractThe war in Ukraine has underscored the risks and threats to global Internet infrastructure from geopolitically motivated cyber operations. The Domain Name System and core protocols responsible for the routing, forwarding, and security of Internet traffic have been exploited by actors in Russia and Ukraine for denial‐of‐service attacks, surveillance, and censorship. Additionally, states have tried to compel organisations that maintain and govern such infrastructure to cut Russia off from the Internet. These cyber operations and sanctions targeting the 'public core of the internet' have serious transboundary effects, and threaten the stability and functionality of the Internet. Most such attacks appear, at the time of writing, to have been buffeted by the internet's resilience, but there is equally the risk that the Ukraine war becomes a permissive, norm‐constitutive moment for similar operations in the future targeting its core physical, institutional and logical infrastructure. The technical community, a growing number of states and other stakeholders have been arguing for the protection of the 'public core' of the internet for nearly a decade, anchoring the concept in policy, multistakeholder and diplomatic fora and documents. This paper, while noting that states increasingly acknowledge the need to protect the public core of the internet, argues that norms and international law are still ill‐equipped to regulate damaging cyber operations, given unsettled questions regarding the sovereignty of states over global Internet infrastructure, and the precise scope of their existing international obligations towards its protection.

This article analyses the recent use of European Union (EU) terminology of digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy, aiming to identify tensions between policy considerations of fundamental rights, free market principles and geopolitical concerns. These tensions are rooted in the disparity between the EU's considerable economic and regulatory power in digital matters and its limited mandate and capabilities in foreign policy. The article also explores the translation of the notions of digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy into EU policy. It identifies three important trends in the geopoliticisation of the EU agenda on digital technologies: (1) the instrumental use of 'classic' internal market policies to exert geopolitical influence; (2) the imposition of foreign policy imperatives on national markets; and (3) new 'hybrid' digital policies that combine internal market concerns, fundamental rights and geopolitical concerns. Ultimately, digital sovereignty has inherent tensions with the EU's normative power in digital issues and may also result in a strategic cacophony.

This edited volume explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming international conflict in cyberspace. Over the past three decades, cyberspace developed into a crucial frontier and issue of international conflict. However, scholarly work on the relationship between AI and conflict in cyberspace has been produced along somewhat rigid disciplinary boundaries and an even more rigid sociotechnical divide - wherein technical and social scholarship are seldomly brought into a conversation. This is the first volume to address these themes through a comprehensive and cross-disciplinary approach. With the intent of exploring the question 'what is at stake with the use of automation in international conflict in cyberspace through AI?', the chapters in the volume focus on three broad themes, namely: (1) technical and operational, (2) strategic and geopolitical, and (3) normative and legal. These also constitute the three parts in which the chapters of this volume are organised, although these thematic sections should not be considered as an analytical or a disciplinary demarcation.