Models of Global Internet Governance and the Projection of State Power: The Case of Facebook and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada

Abstract

In August of 2009 Canada’s Privacy Commissioner announced that Facebook had agreed to institute a series of changes to its privacy policy in order to assure compliance with Canadian law. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s ability to affect such changes and Facebook’s acceptance of them would seem to run contrary to a variety of conventional theories about global internet governance. Through analysis of policy documents as well as interviews with key participants and by engaging literatures on global governance, internet regulation and political economy of communication, this paper will consider how the power of an agency representing the government of one relatively small country perceived and projected in this debate over global communication flows.