Guiding Principles for Internet Policy: A Comparison of Media Coverage in Four Western Countries

Abstract

The governance of the Internet on the global level has attracted much attention. In the process the importance of the national context has gotten downplayed. We argue that understanding of the national context is a necessary complement to research on global governance for an understanding of the dynamics of Internet development. We spotlight the importance of the national context by showing that seemingly global principles have varying import and meaning in four countries—the United States, Germany, Finland, and Sweden. We do so via a qualitative content analysis of leading newspapers.

Keywords:

• guiding principles
• Internet policy
• media coverage
• country comparison
• Western democracies

Notes

The German Federal Ministry of the Interior, for instance, developed guiding principles for Internet policy in 2010 (http://www.bmi.bund.de/cae/servlet/contentblob/1099988/publicationFile/88667/thesen_netzpolitik.pdf), and the Obama Administration developed principles in 2011 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/international_strategy_for_cyberspace.pdf).

Besides academic literature that focused on principles for traditional media regulation, there is a separate body of literature that deals with emerging Internet governance principles. Unlike this body of literature, we do not include principles in our analysis that refer to the way Internet policymaking processes are organized such as the multistakeholder principle (Kleinwächter 2011, 4). We only consider principles that refer to the Internet as object of regulation.

According to McQuail (2007), for scholars, social and political concerns, which dominated European and American communication policy discourses until the 1980s, have been subordinated to technological and economic considerations in contemporary communications policy discussions. Although communications policy practice, and to some extent its research, have moved away from explicit ideological concerns or reference to democracy theories (Künzler 2012), there are still values and principles. It is only that changes in the fundamental principles that guide policy are often more subtle and harder to discern when policy discussions are couched in pragmatic concerns over technology or economics.