 You are listening to the podcast of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. We report on the leading role that new technologies play in the context of the Global Information Society, interviewing academics and industry leaders. Today I'm here with Viktor Meier-Schoenberger, who is one of the leading researchers in Internet and Society issues worldwide, I would say, and the most inspiring guy I know, discussing issues on Internet governance and a broader perspective. Working with the Oxford Internet Institute right now has been working in Harvard on network regulation issues and where we met first, I think, and what I would like to know and to inquire is what is your approach right now on Internet and Society issues? What are the main issues you are working on? What we are working on in Oxford with my team and with others at the Oxford Internet Institute is really to understand the social dynamics that the Internet as a space and as a technological artifact and phenomenon creates or helps shape and facilitates. And I personally am particularly interested in governing and governance, the issue of who has control or who has the ability to shape and reshape the information flows on the Internet. Is there a specific approach you follow there? I perceive and that's a track we want to follow as well, that it's a combination from normative analysis and empirical research. Is that true? That is very much true. I think Internet governance or information flow governance in the past maybe 15 years or so has suffered from a dichotomy between theorists and empiricists. I think the theorists would need more empirics and the empirics would need some theoretical guidance. We hope at the OII to bring this together and we hope to work with others to advance that agenda. We've just talked in a workshop about the notion of intermediaries and the role in governance structures. What is your observation there right now? Are the differences to traditional intermediaries we know like the media or ASAP? Or are there similar tracks that the development and the Internet follows? What we see is that a lot of the conventional existing information intermediaries are under pressure to either reinvent themselves or reconfigure themselves. They also are under pressure through new intermediaries to crop up. So the landscape of intermediaries is going to be reshaped and reconfigured. That in our view does not necessarily mean that the intermediaries go away, but they might be different intermediaries coming up or different relationships among these intermediaries with the citizens and the providers on both ends. That is very interesting to study. I don't believe that we are running out of intermediaries, but I do believe that we see very interesting dynamics in how the landscape of intermediaries gets reshaped. Do you think that this importance and dangers of intermediaries are in the focus of the Internet research worldwide, or are they neglected? I strongly believe that we could do much more to look at the intermediaries. I believe that this is very much understudied on the sort of governance and the more formalistic governance research that we hear that often bases itself in law and doesn't understand that a lot of the intermediaries out there on the Internet now have the ability to set rules and to enforce them quite apart from what the legal system in certain nation-states would command or would put forward. In that sense, it is quite important to understand the role of governance in a much larger framework, not just within the existing players, the nation-state international organizations, but as the ecosystem of many more players. It also requires that some of the established players, like the governments, should engage with these unorthodox new players. You are very familiar with the German research scene as well. Sometimes one might wonder whether thinking in boxes like legal issues or legal issues and social science issues that is very much the approach in Germany. What do you think that's right? I don't want to criticize my German colleagues and friends too openly, but I do want to commend work, for example, that you did at the Hans-Bredo Institute to look beyond existing categories or buckets and to try and understand the changing shape of governance and governing with new actors, new mechanisms of enforcement and so forth coming into play. I hope that the institute here in Berlin will be able to take some of the work that you have done at the Hans-Bredo Institute and expand that and do more stuff on that. We try to do that, definitely. Are there any research questions you came across recently or have learned here, rephrased here at the symposium which might shape our agenda for the institute for the next couple of years? I think if we could go beyond the question of internet governance or beyond the question of who owns, who controls the internet, that technical infrastructure or anything like that, if we could beyond that and look at the information, the bits that flow and the governance and governing of the bits and bits flows, then I think we would have made a conceptual step forward. Excellent. Thanks very much. Thank you.