Global Standard Setting in Internet Governance

Abstract

The standards development organization’s (SDO) role in Internet governance is notable given its central place in society. The bulk of decision-making for the Internet takes place in technical standards fora, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which have no formal state or public sector body membership. Recent years have seen a significant degree of spill-over of highly politicized policy areas such as data protection, digital rights management, security, and bandwidth and spectrum to SDOs, policies which were formerly domains of the nation state. SDOs are grappling with the efficiency of cloud storage, limits of spectrum use, and autonomy and management of devices. Security questions abound as demonstrated by the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Snowden revelations. The book breaks new ground by exploring decision-making within SDOs. It provides an invaluable insight into a world, which, although highly technical, affects the way in which citizens live and work on a daily basis. The work stands out from existing literature on Internet governance, which focuses on international organizations such as the United Nations (UN), the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). As such, it adds significantly to the trajectory of research that explores the relationship between politics and protocols. It explains the interplay between different interests and whether civil society and other actors are able to defend and promote citizens’ rights within SDOs. As such, it contributes to knowledge about how the public interest is promoted.

Internet Fragmentation, Political Structuring, and Organizational Concentration in Transnational Engineering Networks

“…Furthermore, some anecdotal evidence indicates that governments have the tools to influence actors in engineering networks. The Chinese government has been found to exert pressure on Chinese companies in internet governance networks (Galloway and Baogang, 2014; Harcourt et al, 2020; Shen, 2016). Moreover, government regulation might shape engineering collaboration.…”

“…It provides and administers a procedural framework that private actors can use to develop standards and obtain formal IETF endorsement by publishing standards and related experimental and informational documents in the RFC series. The specifics of this process have been described in detail (Harcourt et al, 2020; ten Oever and Moriarty, 2018). Importantly, the IETF depends on the participation and collaboration of private actors, who write RFCs and conduct the underlying research, testing, and negotiations in its hundreds of working groups.…”

“…The IETF is of course only one engineering network. Other cases exist, for example, in the W3C or IEEE (Harcourt et al, 2020). The IETF is interesting, however, because unlike the IEEE it focuses exclusively on internet‐related standards and unlike the W3C, which was founded in 1994, it has existed for a longer period.…”

“…Scholars argue that governments understand the political effects of engineering networks, monitor these networks, and seek to influence participants' behavior (Harcourt et al, 2020;Mueller, 2017;Musiani et al, 2016). For example, the IETF has been a key site for negotiations over improved encryption of internet traffic since the 'Snowden affair' (de Nardis, 2015;Harcourt et al, 2020). Furthermore, some anecdotal evidence indicates that governments have the tools to influence actors in engineering networks.…”

“…Yet, is the internet at risk of fragmentation? Policy and academic literature has approached this question by focusing on divergent policies at the national level (Drake et al, 2016; Freedom House, 2018), the spread of the Internet Protocol (Mueller, 2017), and the consolidation of internet governance institutions (Harcourt et al, 2020; de Nardis, 2014). We adopt a complementary, yet distinct approach.…”