George Christou

• University of Warwick

The issue of trust and control of data online has become critical for many European Union (EU) citizens in an era where we are increasingly reliant on digital platforms across a plethora of everyday activities. Indeed, the future of the EU’s Digital Single Market Policy is reliant on developing trust through robust legislation that ensures explicit...

The threat of cybersecurity globally has increased the need for EU–Asia cooperation to ensure security and resilience within the cyber ecosystem. Focusing on ASEAN and critical cyber states such as Japan, China and the Republic of Korea (JCROK), this chapter explores the problems and prospects of cybersecurity cooperation at the bilateral and multi...

Chapter 4 examines the effect of Snowden on security protocols. For twenty years, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and its successor Transport Layer Security (TLS) provided security for Internet traffic. However, the TLS 1.2 protocol developed in 2008 suffered from a series of implementation and security issues. The 2013 Snowden revelations sent shock wa...

The conclusion situates the book’s findings in academic debates on democracy and the Internet, global self-regulation, and civil society, and international decision-making processes in unstructured environments. It assesses whether current standards-developing organization (SDO) decision-making is able to bridge historical representation gaps and d...

Chapter 2 develops the analytical framework for the book. It sets out the twin theoretical premises of the book, the first relating to global governance at the level of actor influence and the second applying the multiple streams (MS) framework to the level of decision-making within standards-developing organizations (SDOs). It provides critical di...

The standards development organization’s (SDO) role in Internet governance is notable given its central place in society. The bulk of decision-making for the Internet takes place in technical standards fora, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which have no formal state or public sector body membe...

Apple iPhones do not use the standardized micro-Universal Serial Bus (USB) port but specialized ports for their proprietary Lightning connectors. However, in October 2018, Apple’s vice-president of hardware engineering John Ternus announced the switch to USB-C for the new generation of iPads from 2019. Apple iPhone is expected to follow suit. This...

Chapter 3 explains the internal organization of SDOs. It outlines the four main layers which make up the Internet and focuses on the principal SDOs associated with them: the IETF, W3C, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), and IEEE, analysing their governance structures and most salient areas of work. Sta...

Although tracking via social media platforms is widely recognized, as demonstrated by the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal in 2018, other forms of tracking are less well known. Devices such as computers, cameras, and mobile phones can be identified by indicators such as screen size, software versions, and installed fonts. This is called ‘browse...

The local wireless environment has been the setting for the co-existence of licensed mobile communications operators and unlicensed WiFi Internet access providers. The IEEE802.11 family of standards, developed for WiFi services in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), has dominated standards-setting. However, the burgeoning...

The proliferation and persistence of online tracking of consumer behaviour through different technologies for the purpose of collecting information and constructing targeted advertisements based on the profiling of the interests and preferences of users, at surface level, seems relatively harmless. From a marketing perspective, such activity is cru...

This chapter explains one of the most important components of the web: the development and standardization of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and DOM (Document Object Model) which are used for creating web pages and applications. In 1994, Tim Berners-Lee established the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) to work on HTML development. In 1995, the W3C...

Digitization of the airwaves and the consequent ‘digital dividend’ led to the vacating of key parts of the spectrum, the main recipients of which were mobile broadband service providers. However, this has trained the focus of still unsatisfied demands of certain providers to a lesser-known part of the spectrum called TV white spaces. White spaces a...

This introductory chapter charts the debate on and importance of global standard-setting for the Internet and for Internet governance more broadly. Despite being highly contested, the importance of standards-developing organizations (SDOs) for ensuring and maintaining the openness, interconnectivity, and security of the Internet are critical. Their...

This chapter discusses how SDOs have mitigated the targeting of protocol vulnerabilities by security agencies. It begins with protocols identified by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). In this context, the chapter explains legal measures underpinning state surveillance such as the 2018 renewal of Section 702 of the US Foreign Intelligence...

The standards development organization’s (SDO) role in Internet governance is notable given its central place in society. The bulk of decision-making for the Internet takes place in technical standards fora, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which have no formal state or public sector body membe...

The standards development organization’s (SDO) role in Internet governance is notable given its central place in society. The bulk of decision-making for the Internet takes place in technical standards fora, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which have no formal state or public sector body membe...

The standards development organization’s (SDO) role in Internet governance is notable given its central place in society. The bulk of decision-making for the Internet takes place in technical standards fora, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which have no formal state or public sector body membe...

The standards development organization’s (SDO) role in Internet governance is notable given its central place in society. The bulk of decision-making for the Internet takes place in technical standards fora, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which have no formal state or public sector body membe...

The standards development organization’s (SDO) role in Internet governance is notable given its central place in society. The bulk of decision-making for the Internet takes place in technical standards fora, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which have no formal state or public sector body membe...

Reflecting a central premise of the collective securitisation model, it is argued in this article that both specific events and longer-term trends have galvanised and reinforced the EU discourse of increasing threat and risk around cybersecurity, at different points in time. Thus, whilst major cyberattacks have caused the EU to reflect with some ur...

Information and Communications Technologies, in particular the Internet, have been an increasingly important aspect of global social, political and economic life for two decades, and are the backbone of the global information society today. Their evolution and development has brought many benefits but also the threat and practice of serious cyber a...

This article investigates the impact of the eurozone crisis on the foreign policy of an EU Member State, Cyprus. Drawing on the literature on Europeanization of national foreign policies, it is argued that Cypriot foreign policy, despite the general frustration caused by the financial crisis within broader society, has actually undergone further Eu...

The European Union (EU) approach to cybersecurity has five priority areas (Cybersecurity Strategy 2013), and essentially three central strands. The first relates to protecting against and combating cybercrime. The second focuses on Network and Information Security (NIS), Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) and Critical Information Infrastructu...

Cybersecurity is a global challenge (see Chapter 3) that requires international collaboration and partnership with key actors and organisations if it is to be addressed effectively. In this context, a European Union (EU) priority within its cybersecurity strategy is to establish a coherent international cyberspace policy and to promote and project...

This chapter will address the remaining central strands of the Cybersecurity Strategy of the European Union (EUCSS 2013), namely those of Network and Information Security (NIS) and cyber defence. These two areas of cybersecurity policy are driven by two different mandates, and therefore very different processes and actors, even though collaborative...

The concept of human security (HS) and its accompanying agenda, 20 years after the publication of the Human Development Report (1994), are still in a state of flux. This article summarises the extent to which, based on an in-depth analysis of the original HS dimensions in the articles in this Special Issue, the HS agenda has evolved, to the extent...

This paper evaluates the EU's influence in shaping the global governance for telecommunications and the Internet. Through analyzing EU behavior 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 goa...

The language of human security has been prominent in the European Union's (EU) official discourse for a number of years. However, whilst it has been promoted as a new approach for the EU in the development of its security and defence policy, the aim of this article is to assess the extent to which it actually features in the EU's contemporary strat...

The European Commission is an important actor in and of itself, with a distinct role in conflict transformation. There is much academic work on the EU’s role in the Cyprus conflict, and more broadly, on the EU as an actor in conflict prevention and resolution. There is much less work examining the specific role of the European Commission through an...

The Internet is an increasingly important aspect of global social, political and economic life. The international strategic significance of the Internet has led to a number of efforts aimed at co-ordinating, at the global level, the complex and burgeoning series of policy issues at the heart of its functioning. Here, a range of business, civil soci...

This article aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of how two EU Member States, Greece and Cyprus, have influenced the evolution of common EU positions on Russia. Moreover, it exposes how the policies and positions taken up by Greece and Cyprus inside the EU have either undermined or reinforced a common European approach towards Russia acros...

Whilst the global governance architecture of the Internet has evolved at pace in the last 10 years, the European Union's (EU) role and influence in its development has been relatively understudied. This article contributes to closing this gap in the literature through an exposition of how the EU has sought to shape the emerging environment for Inte...

This article argues that the broad security discourse built into the European Union's (EU's) initiatives to the east, and specifically the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and Eastern Partnership (EaP) have in practice not yielded the stability, prosperity and security sought after by the EU. Whilst the EU has pursued bilateral and multilateral...

The central aim of this article is to discuss the question of how we can understand and explain the European Union (EU) as a security actor – in essence, to elaborate on the current literature on security governance in order to provide a more theoretically driven analysis of the EU in security. Our contention is that whilst the current literature o...

Much of the existing literature on the European Union (EU), conflict transformation and border dynamics has been premised on the assumption that the nature of the border determines EU intervention and the consequences that flow from this in terms of EU impact. The article aims to transcend this literature through assessing how domestic interpretati...

At a time when the EU is attempting to mark itself out as a power for transformation, particularly in its neighbourhood, this article analyses the ability of outsiders in the margins of Europe to have a constitutive impact on the nature of the EU's policies, its borders and not least its identity and perception of its security environment. Analysin...

Much academic work on governance in recent years has explored responses that states have made to sectors of the economy, usually historically well rooted nationally, that have been subject to globalizing pressures. Less work exists on responses that are being made to new parts of the economy emerging outside the nation state with inherently global...

Paper Prepared for the New Modes of Regulatory Governance Panel, European Consortium for Political Research General Conference, Pisa, Italy, 6-8 September, 2007. Full-text is available at http://regulation.upf.edu/ecpr-07-papers/ssimpson.pdf Discussion of the evolving system of Internet governance has become prominent in the academic literature ove...

The global governance of the Internet and the influence that the EU is able to exert in international governance institutions are two important topics that this article brings together in the context of the EU's relationship with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), created in 1999 to manage strategically valuable techni...

Full-text of this article is not available in this e-prints service. This article was originally published following peer-review in Journal of Public Policy, published by and copyright Cambridge University Press. The EU plays a significant role in public policy aspects of Internet governance, having created in the late 1990s the dot eu Internet Top...

Paper prepared for the European Consortium for Political Research Joint Sessions, Workshop 23: ‘Transnational Private Governance in the Global Political Economy’, Granada, Spain, April 14-19, 2005. Full-text is available at http://www.essex.ac.uk/ecpr/events/jointsessions/paperarchive/granada/ws23/Simpson.pdf The EU has played a significant role in...

Paper presented to the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Joint Sessions, Workshop 1: “International Organisations and Policy Implementation”. Uppsala, Sweden, April 13-18, 2004. Full-text is available at http://www.essex.ac.uk/ecpr/events/jointsessions/paperarchive/uppsala/ws1/Simpson.pdf By the early 1990s, a series of key technolo...

The European Union (EU) relationship with Turkey has been vague and ambiguous since the Ankara Association agreement in 1963, and as noted by Gomez and Peterson ‘relations between the two sides have swung, pendulum-like, between periods of intense discord and amity’ (2000, p. 14). Turkey aspired to become a member of the EU for many years, but Turk...

Since the application of the government of the Republic of Cyprus was accepted by the European Union (EU) and accession negotiations began in March 1998, controversy has surrounded the extent to which the accession process could help or hinder a solution to the longstanding division on the island. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the ex...

The paper undertakes a review of the how the EU has 'acted' within the Internet governance space that exists and is still being developed at the international level. In the process, the paper assesses the utility of some of the main approaches taken thus far to explain the significance of the EU's activities and concludes by suggesting future direc...

DRAFT Paper presented to the workshop 'The Influence of International Institutions on the EU', Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals, Barcelona, 6-7 May, 2010.

Paper prepared for the 32nd Telecommunications Policy Research Conference : Communication, Information and Internet Policy. George Mason University Law School, Arlington, Virginia, 1-3rd October 2004.