Matthias C. Kettemann: The Normative Order of the Internet: How Rules Are Made and Legitimated in Online Settings

The presentation explores which rules regulate online behaviour and how they are made, enforced, legitimized and contested by states, companies and individuals. Understanding ‘rules’ holistically, the presentation will show that national public law, international law and transnational regulatory arrangements together form the ‘normative order of the Internet’: a complex of norms through which the Internet’s structures and the distribution of goods online are legitimated. The normative order of the Internet is thus an order of justification. New norms can be tested against the principles of the order and predictions can be made as to their normative success. Standards and codes are thus reintegrated into the ‘legal order’.

Importantly, the presentation argues that a ‘normative turn’ has taken place, through which the normative dynamics present on the Internet have self-constitutionalized to the degree that new norms can develop within the normative order of the Internet. Thus it is not technicity that forms the norm, but rather the norm that forms technicity. This is not without consequences for our understanding of how we can shape the use and development of the Internet.

Bio: Dr. Matthias C. Kettemann, LL.M. (Harvard), is posdoctoral fellow at the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders” at the University of Frankfurt am Main and lecturer at the Institute of International Law and International Relations at the University of Graz.