Since the advent of the Internet as a means to practice politics, research in the field has the tendency to treat the Internet as nothing more than an instrument to practice politics. In contrast, according to Melucci (1996), research on social movements should not focus only on new forms of protest, but identify how inequalities arising from these forms of protest generate new political struggles. In the framework of the Network Society, we can observe that citizens increasingly demand new civil rights to overcome inequalities in accessing and in designing ICTs. Following this, the Internet is not only an instrument to practice politics, but serves as a source of new rights claims. This paper explores new claims emerging from the Network Society, and empirically investigates the generation of new campaigns to advance these claims. Following Melucci (1996), contemporary social movements are sensors of new challenges and struggles of current societies. The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement is a social movement clustered around the claim that people must be equally free to construct the meaning of digital technologies. By focusing on the FOSS movement as a case study, this paper highlights how ICTs are not only useful tools to support social movements, but also in themselves the source of new political struggles.
