The politics of privacy in the cyber age: a study of corporate influence over Internet privacy regulations

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The evolving nature of information and communicationstechnology profoundly impacts the protection of personaldata and Internet privacy. Recent events, such as theFacebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, have shown thatgovernments and corporations now have an unprecedentedability to collect, manipulate, and even sell informationabout personal habits. Who governs global Internet privacyregulations? My Ph.D. project seeks to answer this questionby examining the role played by corporate interests inshaping data and privacy regulations at the global level. Towhat extent do powerful corporate interests dominateglobal privacy regulations or do these regulations reflectthe interests of a broader range of societal interests? Ipropose an empirical examination of these questions in thecontext of the ''focal regulatory agencies'' that determineInternet privacy regulations at the global level: namely,Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers(ICANN), World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and InternetSociety. My central argument is that the superior resourcesof corporate interests, like greater finances and policyrelevant information, are sufficient but not necessaryconditions for influencing global data protection standards.Instead, how resources get translated into influencedepends largely on institutional opportunity (the amount ofaccess to decision-making processes) and issue salience(the amount of public attention given to specific regulatoryissues).