“Disconnection of the elites”, “Internet governance”, or “transitional hacktivism”, the categories employed in order to analyse or comment the internet regulation lost no time before asserting a disappearance of the States, considered as powerless, illegitimate, ineffective in front of the network development. The decentralized architecture, the Internet international deployment, and the emergence of new online participations take part in the crisis of State methods in organizing society. Yet, from the fight against illegal downloads to the surveillance of electronic communications, the States contribute to the Internet ordering.
This PhD dissertation investigates the mechanisms behind the development of a state intervention into digital networks. It deals with the bureaucratic enterprises and inter-field alliances which condition the setting of new public policies in a field that has been since then very little invested by political and administrative actors. First apprehended as being against the State, the Internet government gradually falls within the structures of bureaucracy itself.
Ground in the United States: between hackers and lecturers in law
The investigation realized within the framework of the mobility Tepsis aims at objectifying the traffic of ideas between activists and American jurists at the origin of a political theory of networks. In the American universities, multidisciplinary centers of studies of the digital technology develop a reflection on the government of the internet which articulates legal and computing knowledges, academic production and militant commitment. From comprehensive interviews, from the observation of seminaries and militant meetings, I highlight the exchanges which take place to promote a technical governance of the internet.
