2 - Managing Cyber Attacks as a Global Collective Action Problem

Summary

This chapter opens with a brief typology of cyber conflict encapsulating cybercrime, espionage, war, and terrorism. The examination then moves on to investigate first how and why these categories are breaking down in the Information Age, and second what comparative approaches to regulating cyberspace and managing cyber conflict exist as juxtaposed against other global collective action problems. The tragedy of the unmanaged commons scenario, from which many collective action problems derive, predicts the overexploitation of common pool resources and has, traditionally, been moderated by three management solutions: privatization, nationalization, and common property legal regimes. Accordingly, this chapter introduces each of these concepts and reflects on the potential and limits of these approaches, including the CHM concept that was introduced to govern the deep seabed and the Moon as applied to cyberspace. The debate is then viewed through the lens of polycentric governance generally as well as through an introduction to a range of leading institutional design frameworks, including the Ostrom Design Principles, which are in turn applied to the case studies in Part II.