Towards a Theory of Information Control: Content Regulation, Disciplinary Capacity and the Governance on the Internet

Questions of Internet regulation and governance are enormously laden with normative presumptions. This is particularly the case in regard to Freedom of Expression and its restriction that is typically termed ‘censorship.’ This chapter proposes a theoretical model of information control based on (a) communities of practice, (b) governance through architecture and (c) network gatekeeping to assist in understanding how the boundaries of Internet expression are defined. It argues that communities of practice regulate speech according to their own logics of appropriateness.