This article explores bottom-up grassroots ordering in internet governance, investigating the efforts by a group of civil society actors to inscribe human rights in internet infrastructure, lobbying the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Adopting a Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective, we approach this struggle as a site of contestation, and expose the sociotechnical imaginaries animating policy advocacy. Combining quantitative mailing-list analysis, participant observation and qualitative discourse analysis, the article observes civil society in action as it contributes to shape policy in the realm of institutional and infrastructure design.
The Internet architecture is widely perceived as engine for innovation by providing the equal opportunity to deploy new protocols and applications. This view reflects an imaginary that guides the co-production of policy and technology that can be traced back to the early days of the Internet, which is still prominent among the engineers in one of the main governance bodies of the Internet, the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF). After the privatization of the Internet architecture in the 1990s, the interplay between the architectural principles of end-to-end, permissionless innovation, and openness subverted equality among Internet users and hampered their ability to redesign the Internet. I draw on media studies, science and technology studies and international political economy, and use a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to show how the Internet architecture’s affordance structure got reconfigured, and how this facilitated the prioritization of corporate interests over the interests of end users.
Human rights have long been discussed in relation to global governance processes, but there has been disagreement about whether (and how) a consideration for human rights should be incorporated into the workings of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), one of the main bodies of Internet governance. Internet governance is generally regarded as a site of innovation in global governance; one in which civil society can, in theory, contribute equally with government and industry. This article uses the lens of boundary object theory to examine how civil society actors succeeded in inscribing human rights as a Core Value in ICANN's bylaws. As a "boundary object" in the negotiations, the concept of human rights provided enough interpretive flexibility to translate to the social realities of the various stakeholder groups, including government and industry. This consensus-building process was bound by the organizing structure of the boundary object (human rights), and its ability to accommodate the interests of the different parties. The presence of civil society at the negotiating table demanded a shift in strategy from the usual "outsider" tactics of issue framing and agenda setting, to a more complex and iterative process of "productive contestation," a consensus-building process fueled by the differences of experience and interests of parties, bound together by the organizing structure of the boundary object. This article describes how this process ultimately resulted in the successful adoption of human rights in ICANN's bylaws.
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