| Summary: | Digital technologies are profoundly intertwined with constitutionalism. They are not only a
sum of material and immaterial architecture but also an infrastructure to exercise freedoms and powers.
Digital technologies are likely to remain the key driver of global governance transformation in the next
decades, but the current transformation of Internet governance promises to affect this relationship. This
paper argues that Internet governance is evolving towards fragmentation, polarisation and hybridisation.
These trends do not just concern the governance of the technical infrastructure. They also contribute to
reshaping the architecture of freedom and power in the digital environment, giving impetus to a new
role for constitutionalism in the digital age. Therefore, the primary question is how far does this
technological evolution lead towards a new constitutional paradigm in the digital age? As moving to
govern digital spaces at the crossroads of a new phase, these trends question the global paradigm at the
basis of the Internet, thus opening a new research agenda. By examining the challenges raised by
fragmentation, polarisation and hybridisation in the governance of multiple Internets, this work
underlines how this new phase affects not only the technical architecture itself, but also the
constitutional models to protect rights and limit powers on a global scale.
|
|---|