Successful first seminar in the Internet Politics seminar serie

This series of seminars seek to capture the current status and workings of Internet politics. The seminars have been made possible through support from the CBS Public-Private Platform and the long term goal is to strike up more conversations about what we have termed Internet, Business and Society.

The first seminar – on ‘ACTA, SOPA, PIPA and Public-Private Relations’ used the controversies over trade agreements such as SOPA, PIPA and ACTA to launch a discussion of the tensions and interesting configurations of forces currently seeking to shape the Internet. To help us make sense of these developments, we had invited the CEO of The Danish Internet Forum, which hosts and administrates the .dk domain and represents some of the voices in the private sector, who are seemingly pressured into playing a more active role in Internet control. And also, the founder of a think tank called Bitbureauet, which has been central to the Danish and European civil society resistance towards ACTA.

The seminar, which brought together approximately 35 students and faculty from across CBS, made it clear that what we see right now is a struggle not only between states seeking to develop more strict forms of control over the Internet and those calling for Internet freedom. But it is also a struggle between two different business models – between companies such as the film industry, music industry etc. who have developed elaborate systems for proprietary control and full control over the entire value chain, and those companies living off sharing,  data aggregation, and so on.