Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the politics behind Internet governance of definitions and standards in the European Union context. It focuses on the conflicts between European legislation and private companies when trying to regulate behaviours online, while looking at spam and web-cookies as a case study.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the politics of categorizing and regulating behaviours on the Internet while focusing on the European Union. Specifically, it examines how unwanted forms of communications are categorized as spam while others as cookies, and what are the consequences of such a process. This research was conducted by undertaking policy analysis of European legislation related to spam and cookies, mainly of the European Commission, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, as well as analysing technical documents of the Internet standards organisation the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This paper contributes to STS literature by arguing that ambiguity and lack of decisive definition in the legal discourse allows for power relations to be constructed and performed on the Internet. Importantly, governance in the European Union is enabled by the delegation of power to private companies under the self-regulation approach. Such strategies facilitate the institutionalization of the European Union e-commerce, and point to the influence of technology's materiality on the way people understand and engage with the Internet.