Since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, internet and telecommunication infrastructure became one of the primary targets for Russian forces. While media coverage has largely centred on physical infrastructure, this paper examines a less visible but equally significant case: the forced transfers of internet numeric resources in temporarily occupied territories (TOT). This paper argues that illegitimate transfers of IP address ranges and ASNs, alongside other infrastructural interventions, represent a broader process of territorialisation through which occupation is enacted in spatial, temporal and corporeal terms. It discusses how the case was addressed within the RIPE Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) and the RIPE community. Drawing on qualitative discourse analysis of RIPE mailing list discussions, policy documents, organisation statements and news sources, this paper examines how the normative regime of neutrality shaped the adopted measures. Numeric resources are conceptualised as infrastructures of territorialisation that extend beyond technical identifiers, shaping jurisdictional control and producing subjects of occupation. By bringing critical infrastructure studies and science and technology studies (STS) into dialogue with internet governance studies, the paper argues for a more context-sensitive approach to internet governance—one that accounts for the material dimensions of internet infrastructures under conditions of war and occupation.

This article proposes de-centring the Russia-focused history of the Soviet computer networks by engaging with the developments in Soviet and post-Soviet Lithuania. Although in Lithuania the computer industry and digital connectivity developed as part of the Soviet big science and large systems, its politics took a different shape locally and regionally through incremental and situated practices. I argue that the national politics of digitality in the late Soviet modernity combined both autarchic and transnational orientations in effect creating lasting computer engineer communities. Drawing on a study of the archival and published materials and interviews with Lithuanian, Russian and international computer scientists and engineers, I show that, first, the scientific communities outside key Russian sites actively engaged in experimenting with remote digital communication since the 1960s and, second, that the legacy of these experiments was socially, materially and institutionally significant during the transformation into liberal democracy and market economy and connecting to the transnational networks and flows of technology in the 1990s.

This article argues that Sovietera expert institutions, such as the Tallinn Institute of Cybernetics, played a central role in the post-1991 development of the so-called digital state. By tracing the origins of the decentralized and distributed data exchange layer, the Estonian X-Road, to Soviet attempts in building a national Automated Control System, this article shows how information networks and databases became central to late socialist politics, and how questions over the structure of the network (centralized vs decentralized) and content of accumulated data (economic vs social) became sites of contestation during Perestroika. Having won this struggle in the 1980s, anti-Soviet Estonian engineers and visionaries then rewrote their own histories, arguing that the X-Road was a distinctly novel, Western-oriented technology, rather than the continuation of a decades-long Soviet debate.

The historiographical treatment of Albania often depicts isolation. However, its computer network history reveals the flows of information, commodities and individuals between Albania and the world. It reflects Albania’s fluctuating international relations with the USSR and China, the United Nations and the role of Soros Foundation in the 1990s. This study focuses on these last two little-known periods. Between 1981 and 1989, Albania’s Institute of Informatics and Applied Mathematics (INIMA) benefitted from the establishment of a “computer network for the development of scientific and technical activities” under the aegis of UNESCO, UNDP and implemented by the French company Bull. Based on direct testimonies from Bull project managers and Albanians trained in France, this study explores the expectations of the Albanian regime, the relationship developed between Albanian and foreign technicians, the effects of the training of Albanians abroad, and the impact of applied informatics in Albania. We also draw on UNESCO reports, newspapers, public speeches and archives available in Albania. While this project consolidated INIMA’s capacities during the 1980s, its survival was at stake in the 1990s. We then look in particular at the role of Soros Foundation, a unique case of an international NGO providing Internet access between 1996 and 2000. We analyse testimonies via the AlbNet mailing list archives. This enables us to see the socio-technical choices made by UNDP, the marginalisation of INIMA and the importance of Soros Foundation.

In Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997), the Supreme Court encountered the internet and defined it as a speech system protected by the First Amendment. Nearly 30 years later, this view is ubiquitous. Where did this vision of the internet come from? This article tells that story. Contrary to an academic consensus that this idea resulted from the Californian Ideology, this article shows the origin of the ideological and legal recipe for how the US internet should work was written in the 1940s by a network of liberal, cybernetic Cold Warriors who believed democracy could be safeguarded from authoritarianism through participation, which provided for individual liberty and democratic stability. These themes culminated in Ithiel de Sola Pool’s book Technologies of Freedom, which articulated a symbolic framework for understanding networked computers, the forerunner of the internet, as a speech system. He sought to protect their participatory affordances through absolute First Amendment coverage, which influenced key legal internet architects at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who would successfully bring his ideas to the Reno Court. This story explains where one of the core American ideas of what the internet is for comes from and teaches where US internet law comes from.

The history of the internet has too often privileged engineers and entrepreneurs, obscuring the everyday labour that sustained its social foundations. This article recovers that history through the career of Rebecca Newton, a pioneering North American community manager whose work across AOL, Habbo Hotel, Moshi Monsters, and SuperAwesome demonstrates how community management emerged as both a profession and a vital form of socio-cultural stewardship. Newton also co-founded e-mint, the first formal community of practice for online community managers, which established collective norms and knowledge-sharing that supported the field’s professionalisation. Her trajectory illustrates how online community management codified repertoires of governance, ethics of care, and professional norms that continue to shape the field. It also highlights the plurality of global pathways: precarious ghost work in the Global South, commodified belonging in Silicon Valley, and decentralised governance in federated platforms. These trajectories underscore that community management’s evolution is contingent and contested, shaped by region, infrastructure, and political economy. Despite its central role in digital life, community management remains under-represented in academic literature, typically reduced to marketing (Armstrong & Hagel, 1996; McWilliam, 2000), trust and safety (Paech, 2025), or narrowly equated with moderation. Recovering Newton’s contributions shows that online community management is not peripheral but central to the internet’s hidden architectures, and indispensable for imagining more accountable digital governance.

The Open Forum of AIDS Info BBS was a pioneering digital platform that emerged during the early HIV/AIDS crisis to address critical gaps in reliable information amidst widespread institutional failures and pervasive stigma. The Open Forum fostered lay expertise and reshaped the boundaries between conventional and community-based knowledge production. Through qualitative analysis of 2,796 archived posts, we explore how people with HIV/AIDS, caregivers, healthcare providers, and activists collaboratively synthesised biomedical knowledge and personal experiences to inform treatment and survival strategies. The Forum facilitated participatory knowledge-making, blending anecdotal evidence with emerging scientific insights to challenge dominant modes of expertise and authority. Users negotiated credibility through rigorous debate, mutual validation, and dynamic interactions, creating a novel model of information exchange and expertise. Our findings reveal how digital platforms empowered marginalised communities to navigate uncertainty, critique institutional biases, and advocate for inclusive, actionable health practices. AIDS Info BBS prefigured now pervasive digital health information seeking and contemporary online health forums, demonstrating the enduring importance of user-driven, collaborative approaches. This study underscores the transformative and enduring impact of such spaces on the production, validation, and dissemination of health and medical knowledges amidst crisis.