A Social Network Analysis On The Competition Situation Of The Actors In Global Internet Governance

The competition of the actors is a core challenge in global Internet governance.Focusing on the competition situation of the actors,this paper had looked back to the history of actors of global Internet governance.The history can be divided into four parts: the self-governance of American engineers,the privatization reform in America,the game playing in UN,and the phase of past-Snowden.Then the paper used social network analysis to research the competition situation of the actors.The data sources are from 29 actors joining 109 important events in 1997-2017.In this part,some index such as density,distance,centrality,core-periphery,sub-groups and structural holes in SNA are presented.The research findings mainly included three aspects:(1)The competition situation of the actors in global Internet governance is similar with the world order in offline world,in which America and other developed countries are the most powerful actors,and G20 members and other developing countries have few power.This competition order can be described as“core—semi-periphery—periphery”.However there is a significant tendency of multi-polarization.(2)Between different kinds of actors,countries are still the most important power,and intergovernmental organizations,technical communities,private sector also shared some powers,while civil society is the last one to have power.(3)China occupies the structural hole in the network,that means it can be the intermediary connecting developed countries and developing countries.The fourth chapter of the passage analyzed the influence factors of the competition situation of the actors,which are legitimacy,capacity and resource of different kinds of actors,and four kinds of cyberpower of the countries: compulsory,institutional,structural,productive.The last chapter gives a strategy to improve the participation of global Internet governance from four aspects: building platform,leading regional and developing countries,cooperating with developed countries and global collaboration.