The chapter begins by giving an overview of the background against which efforts to agree on international norms regulating cybersecurity take place. It highlights intensifying cyberthreats, increasing geopolitical tensions, and the rise of China, as well as a backlash against economic globalisation, which call for a reassessment of cybersecurity governance. It then summarises the main aims of the book, which examines cybersecurity challenges, governance responses to them, and their limitations, engaging an interdisciplinary approach combining legal and international relations disciplines. It builds on the fundamental premise that cybersecurity challenges require a widely agreed-upon set of international norms. it examines the current political and legal contexts of cybersecurity governance and highlights the divide between two contrasting models of cybergovernance: state-oriented and market-oriented. The chapter then offers a brief overview of all chapters of the book.

This chapter problematises the expansion of transnational counter-terrorism, demonstrating that transnational counter-terrorism was set up with such expansion in its sights, and – most importantly – that the expansion has not ended yet. It uses the examples of borders, preventing/countering violent extremism (P/CVE), and internet regulation to illustrate the reach and effects of expansionism. Finally, it draws attention to growing tendency at transnational level to present counter-terrorism as a mode of human rights protection and fulfilment, with significant consequences for the possible future extension of counter-terrorism into human rights. The chapter shows that transnational counter-terrorism sprawl is partly a self-perpetuating technique; its sprawl at once suggests the severity and scale of the problem of ‘terrorism’ and empowers and expands the transnational counter-terrorism order itself. It tends towards establishing the indispensability of transnational counter-terrorism and, thus, towards securing its future as a powerful mode of transnational governance.

This chapter is both a retrospective, and also even a requiem, for the “unregulation” argument in Internet law, and a prospective on the next twenty-five years of computer (or cyber) law. The Internet is not a lawless, special unregulated zone; it never was. Now that broadband Internet is ubiquitous, mobile, and relatively reliable in urban and suburban areas, it is being regulated as all mass media before it. While American policymakers advocated a largely deregulatory approach to the internet over the past twenty-five years, the United Kingdom and Europe have emphasized the hybrid of governmental and private market oversight known as coregulation. This approach to making regulation more adaptive addresses key dilemmas that fast-moving, slippery technologies pose for the traditional regulator’s toolkit.