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China’s globalizing Internet describes a situation where China is using the Internet as a tool or medium to transmit its voice on the world stage and enhance its influence over the global Internet governance system and the global digitalization process. Several concerns, however, exist regarding China’s globalizing Internet strategies. This paper aims to respond to these concerns and enhance the understanding of China’s globalizing Internet strategies.

This paper will use content analysis to trace the policy development trajectory of China’s globalizing Internet, including policy vision, policy-making agencies and policy tools.

The Chinese government has issued a considerable number of policies to regulate and promote the development of the Internet since 2014. The key trend that emerged from the analysis of China’s globalizing Internet policy is the cooperation among different agencies. Existing policies have comprehensively used the supply-oriented tools, the environment-oriented tools and the demand-oriented tools; and the last two tools have been used more frequently in recent years.

The analysis results contribute to understanding how China uses digital technology to enhance its influence over the global Internet governance system.

The growth of online communities and social media has led to a growing need for methods, concepts, and tools for researching online cultures. Particular attention should be paid to polarizing online discussion cultures and dynamics that increase inequality in online environments. Social media has enormous potential to create good, but in order to unlock its full potential, we also need to examine the mechanisms keeping these spaces monotonous, homogenous, and even hostile toward some groups. With this need in mind, I have developed the concept and theory of othering online discourse (OOD).

This chapter introduces and defines the concept of OOD and explains the key characteristics and different attributes of OOD in relation to other concepts that deal with disruptive and discriminatory behavior in online spaces. The attributes of OOD are demonstrated drawing on examples gathered from the Finnish Suomi24 (Finland24) forum.

This paper brings focus and attention to the aspect of time within health information behaviour. The purpose of this paper is to critically assess and present strengths and weaknesses of utilising the infodemiology approach and metrics as a novel way to examine temporal variations and patterns of online health information behaviour. The approach is shortly exemplified by presenting empirical evidence for temporal patterns of health information behaviour on different time-scales.

A short review of online health information behaviour is presented and methodological barriers to studying the temporal nature of this behaviour are emphasised. To exemplify how the infodemiology approach and metrics can be utilised to examine temporal patterns, and to test the hypothesis of existing rhythmicity of health information behaviour, a brief analysis of longitudinal data from a large discussion forum is analysed.

Clear evidence of robust temporal patterns and variations of online health information behaviour are shown. The paper highlights that focussing on time and the question of when people engage in health information behaviour can have significant consequences.

Studying temporal patterns and trends for health information behaviour can help in creating optimal interventions and health promotion campaigns at optimal times. This can be highly beneficial for positive health outcomes.

A new methodological approach to study online health information behaviour from a temporal perspective, a phenomenon that has previously been neglected, is presented. Providing evidence for rhythmicity can complement existing epidemiological data for a more holistic picture of health and diseases, and their behavioural aspects.

Understanding customers is critical for service researchers and practitioners. Today, customers are increasingly active online, and valuable information about their opinions, experiences and behaviors can be retrieved from a variety of online platforms. Online customer information creates new opportunities to design personalized and high-quality service. This paper aims to review how netnography as a method can help service researchers and practitioners to better use such data.

A systematic review and analysis were conducted on 321 netnography studies published in marketing journals between 1997 and 2017.

The systematic review reveals that netnography has been applied in a variety of ways across different marketing fields and topics. Based on the analysis of existing netnography literature, empirical, theoretical and methodological recommendations for future netnographic service research are presented.

This paper shows how netnography can offer service researchers unprecedented opportunities to access naturalistic online data about customers and, hence, why it is an important method for future service research.

Netnographic research can help service firms with, for example, service innovation, advertising and environmental scanning. This paper provides guidelines for service managers who want to use netnography as a market research tool.

Netnography has seen limited use in service research despite many promising applications in this field. This paper is the first to encourage and support service researchers in their use of the method and aims to stimulate interesting future netnographic service research.

The study examines how the technical features and associated social practices of an anonymous, text-based online forum intended for young people make it a unique platform for acquiring and sharing health information among peers.

The features and content of a young people's section of a popular Finnish discussion forum were examined with a focus on health-related threads. Observational notes and thread content were analysed with a focus on the forum's affordances for health information practices.

The findings indicate that the forum's affordances including anonymity, persistence, searchability, cohesion and tolerance enabled the pooling of peer experiences, opinions and experience-based advice on health, rather than sharing factual information or embracing reciprocal discussion. As such, instead of competing for a cognitive authority position with medical authorities or offering emotional support like tight online support communities, the anonymous forum served as a platform for young people to gain information on others' experiences and opinions on sensitive, mundane and disnormative health issues and for reflecting their own lived experiences to those of others.

The study is original in its approach to examining the affordances of an online platform for health information practices. It helps in understanding young people's ways of using different resources to meet their diverse health information needs and the value of gaining access to experiential health information.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of doxxing: the practice of publishing private, proprietary, or personally identifying information on the internet, usually with malicious intent. Undertaking a scoping review of research into doxxing, we develop a typology of this form of technology-facilitated violence (TFV) that expands understandings of doxxing, its forms and its harms, beyond a taciturn discussion of privacy and harassment online. Building on David M. Douglas's typology of doxxing, our typology considers two key dimensions of doxxing: the form of loss experienced by the victim and the perpetrator's motivation(s) for undertaking this form of TFV. Through examining the extant literature on doxxing, we identify seven mutually non-exclusive motivations for this form of TFV: extortion, silencing, retribution, controlling, reputation-building, unintentional, and doxxing in the public interest. We conclude by identifying future areas for interdisciplinary research into doxxing that brings criminology into conversation with the insights of media-focused disciplines.

The issue of cybersecurity has been cast as the focal point of a fight between two conflicting governance models: the nation-state model of national security and the global governance model of multi-stakeholder collaboration, as seen in forums like IGF, IETF, ICANN, etc. There is a strange disconnect, however, between this supposed fight and the actual control over cybersecurity “on the ground”. This paper aims to reconnect discourse and control via a property rights approach, where control is located first and foremost in ownership.

This paper first conceptualizes current governance mechanisms through ownership and property rights. These concepts locate control over internet resources. They also help us understand ongoing shifts in control. Such shifts in governance are actually happening, security governance is being patched left and right, but these arrangements bear little resemblance to either the national security model of states or the global model of multi-stakeholder collaboration. With the conceptualization in hand, the paper then presents case studies of governance that have emerged around specific security externalities.

While not all mechanisms are equally effective, in each of the studied areas, the author found evidence of private actors partially internalizing the externalities, mostly on a voluntary basis and through network governance mechanisms. No one thinks that this is enough, but it is a starting point. Future research is needed to identify how these mechanisms can be extended or supplemented to further improve the governance of cybersecurity.

This paper bridges together the disconnected research communities on governance and (technical) cybersecurity.

This study explores the different learning practices of Chinese incubators in Chongqing and Chengdu and delves into how these “learning huddles” influence incubatees' absorptive capacity (the ability to apply knowledge) to improve their chance of success (sustainable growth).

This explorative study uses a qualitative case study approach by means of semi-structured interviews with business incubation managers and incubatees across three business incubators in Chengdu and Chongqing. The data are transcribed, coded and analyzed using an analytic map for the explanation of building and reflecting on the theoretical propositions, leading to a further understanding of the “learning huddle” mechanism.

The study finds that incubatees perceive that their absorptive capacity is increased through vicarious informal learning practices that promote access to networks and thereby builds social capital to improve their likelihood of success.

This study has limitations in sample size and design. The explorative case study approach uses a nonrandom case selection of three incubators in Chongqing and Chengdu and has a limited number of interviewees, which may lack representation of the general Chinese business incubation population and may not sufficiently be generalized beyond the sample itself.

These findings have important implications for business incubation programs. Business incubators that build learning huddles (networks) create a nurturing shared learning environment, which is suitable for incubatees to collectively absorb knowledge at the early stage of their life cycle and improve their likelihood of sustainable growth.

Since this study is limited to a Chinese context, it is also hoped that future researchers use the typology of business incubator learning practices to explore cross-culture variables, as these may influence the business incubation operations and performance.

This study adds to the discussion on how collective learning practices facilitate absorptive capacity and build social capital, which in turn improves incubatees' chance of sustainable growth and as such the authors hope that the learning practice's typology and how incubatees determine their success stimulates further research for measuring the likelihood of incubatees sustainable growth.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the ‘real’ world and substantially impacted the virtual world and thus the Internet ecosystem. It has caused a significant exogenous shock that offers a wealth of natural experiments and produced new data about broadband, clouds, and the Internet in times of crisis. In this chapter, we characterise and evaluate the evolving impact of the global COVID-19 crisis on traffic patterns and loads and the impact of those on Internet performance from multiple perspectives. While we place a particular focus on deriving insights into how we can better respond to crises and better plan for the post-COVID-19 ‘new normal’, we analyse the impact on and the responses by different actors of the Internet ecosystem across different jurisdictions. With a focus on the USA and Europe, we examine the responses of both public and private actors, with the latter including content and cloud providers, content delivery networks, and Internet service providers (ISPs). This chapter makes two contributions: first, we derive lessons learned for a future post-COVID-19 world to inform non-networking spheres and policy-making; second, the insights gained assist the networking community in better planning for the future.

This paper aims to examine the recommendation system of the video-sharing website YouTube to study how control of users is effected on online platforms.

This paper conceptualises algorithmic systems as protocols – technological and social infrastructures that both facilitate and govern interactions between autonomous actors (Galloway and Thacker, 2004, 2007). It adopts a netnographic approach (Kozinets, 2002) to study not only the formal, technological systems of the platform but also the systems as they were made sense of, understood and enacted upon by actors. It relies both on information as revealed by the organisation itself, as well as discussions between lay users in online forums and press coverage.

The results of this study indicate that the ways in which platforms selectively facilitate interactions between users constitute a form of control. While maintaining the appearance of an open and neutral marketplace, interactions on the platform are in fact highly structured. The system relies on the surveillance of user interactions to rapidly identify and propagate marketable contents, so as to maximise user “engagement” and ad revenue. The systems place few demands or restrictions on individual users, instead control is effected in a probabilistic fashion, over the population of users as a whole, so as to, in aggregate, accomplish organisational goal.

This paper contributes to the literature on accounting and control practices in online spaces, by extending the notion of control beyond overt rankings and evaluations, to the underlying technical and social infrastructures that facilitate and shape interactions.