The growing importance of information exchange in a knowledge based society causes regulatory and repressive attempts by state actors. As the internet is more and more commonly interpreted as a critical infrastructure as well as it stays a high potential infrastructure of open interaction, governmental desires in monitoring the internet are growing. In order to realise the logic of internal security from a state actor’s perspective in the Internet, three theses come up: • Governments try to achieve their logic of ‘real life’ internal security also within the internet regime. • The internet changed the society in so far as it opened space for new relevant communities and actors. • Governments attempt to control these societal changes via cyber politics. Regarding the two layers of information governance – namely infrastructure and access – they are both of interest for an internal security actor. However, it tends to be the access layer which gained more attention recently. Here, two demonstrative examples are the discussion about blockades of internet pages (in the context of countering child pornography) in the EU and, on the other hand, attempts to make any technology based information exchange traceable with the help of a European scheme of data retention (EU direction 2006/24/EC). To understand the resulting conflicts, it is important to discover the underlying logics of the two involved regimes – state dominated internal security policies versus internet governance. The Internet constitutes an own regime, including different arenas of action, actors and underlies a specific logic regarding data usage, property rights as well as freedom of information. This regime developed more or less independently from the classical political system. When these two regimes overlap, there arises a competition about the power to shape social and political life, because both have their own logic and actors: At the moment, when policies refer to net activities or the Internet becomes a policy field, the two systems interlink in their content. But, beside the same content, actors and logics can diffuse. In this case a competition situation on the dominant logic of action occurs as well as on the position of the participating actors. To show this theoretical framework, it is the aim to analyse two cases of “internal security meeting the internet” namely the UK and Germany. A focus will lie on each national way towards legislation countering Child pornography in the net and the implementation of the EU’s data retention directive shall be analysed.
