The real cyber war

“Connection” already feels like the 21st century's most overworked trope. Usually featured in advertising copy for digital products, “connection,” and specifically the “freedom to connect,” is also the lodestar for U.S. diplomacy under the Obama Administration. The “freedom to connect” was articulated in a speech titled “Remarks on Internet Freedom” that then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered on 21 January 2010, on the heels of the so-called Twitter Revolution that followed the 2009 Iranian presidential election but before the “Arab Spring.” The idea of the “freedom to connect” initiated an Internet freedom agenda that continues as the beating heart of the United States' public diplomacy. However, as Shawn M. Powers and Michael Jablonski's excellent The Real Cyber War: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom demonstrates, the rhetoric of connection and freedom often conceals a dynamic struggle over the political economy of the Internet. This struggle, which they deem the “real” cyber war, is an important one to attend to for scholars from communication, political science, law, and economics. Practitioners and policymakers, too, will find in The Real Cyber War the historical context, key stakeholders, and ongoing tensions that shape policy developments related to information law, Internet governance, public–private partnerships, cybersecurity, surveillance, and democracy promotion. Powers and Jablonski execute the close knitting that is the hallmark of careful political economy work—The Real Cyber War documents the interests at play in contemporary international communication and issues a clarion call to think otherwise about how the Internet might serve global interests rather than parochial ones

Diplomacy · Freedom of the press · Internet governance · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Sociology · The Internet · Computer Science · Cybersecurity and Cyber Warfare Studies · Law · Public Administration

• The Future of Internet Governance

  Open Access•Richard Hills, Richard Hill•Sociology and Anthropology•2018

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