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Shaping the global communications milieu: The EU's influence on Internet and telecommunications governance

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Comparative European Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

This article evaluates the European Union's (EU) influence in shaping the global governance for telecommunications and the Internet. Through analysing EU behaviour within an actorness framework, we demonstrate how the external opportunity structure and the EU's internal environment has impacted on its ability to exert and maximize its presence in order to meet its goals and aims in these two very different sub-sectors of global communications in terms of evolution and development. Such a comparison of EU actorness, we argue, is revealing in terms of uncovering the underlying factors and conditions that allow the EU to influence two important and dynamic communications sub-sectors.

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Notes

  1. Essentially relinquishing US unilateral control over ICANN.

  2. And the EU Telecommunications Committee in which national Member States were represented.

  3. Neelie Kroes, successor to Viviane Reding as Commissioner for Information Society and Media, has been less assertive in relation to Internet governance and it is noticeable that the Commission seems to have moved towards a more consensual approach internally on Internet governance given her appointment (Authors’ interview, April 2010).

  4. Which replaced the Joint Project Agreement between the US Department of Commerce and ICANN on 1 October 2009.

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Christou, G., Simpson, S. Shaping the global communications milieu: The EU's influence on Internet and telecommunications governance. Comp Eur Polit 12, 54–75 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2012.33

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