Host institution: University of Stavanger (UiS) 🇳🇴
Supervisors: Prof. Helle Sjøvaag (UiS) and Prof. Reza Tadayoni (AAU)
Academic secondment: Aalborg University (AAU) 🇩🇰
Industrial secondment: Altibox 🇳🇴
PhD duration: 3 years
This PhD project is titled: Digital infrastructures in the public interest and is part of WP5 Digital infrastructures.
In today’s media ecosystem, technical infrastructure is no longer an invisible conveyer of information, but an enabler of communication. The health of the media sphere is determined by the stability and vulnerability, as well as the ownership and independence of digital infrastructures. The shift to Internet-based content distribution also implies that media companies, to a very large extent, have become critically dependent on external, foreign, technology providers for content production and distribution, and organisational management, raising cyber-security challenges.
The position calls for projects that examine the role and potential of telecoms to ensure universal communication infrastructure services, amidst geo-political tensions and ownership concentration in sectors including submarine cables, satellite-based Internet services, CDN market and data centres.
The position calls for projects that examine the robustness of media delivery infrastructure and the transformational role of telecommunication actors in providing public interest content. Areas of research for the PhD project include, but are not limited to:
- The role of national telecoms in the communication infrastructure
- Displacement of telecoms in the internet industries
- Business models for telecom in the internet ecosystem
- Telecom in the broadband, CDN, cable, peering, and data centre industries
- The role of telecom in media distribution
- The political economy of Tier 1 internet provision
- Regulation of the telecom sector.
Methodologies could include qualitative and quantitative methods, mixed approaches as well as computational methods.
Tasks foreseen include research and dissemination activities. The candidate will be associated with the Digital Society Research Group, and will be enrolled in the University of Stavanger’s PhD-programme in Social Science, pending approval of the PhD proposal. The candidate is expected to carry out an extended secondment with Altibox, the largest fibre-based telecommunication company in Norway, based in Stavanger.