Requiem for a Dream: On Advancing Human Rights via Internet Architecture

Abstract

A growing number of scholars and policymakers are calling attention to the relationship between technology standards, protocols, human rights, ethics, and values—also claiming that human rights can be secured (or violated) via the Internet's standards and architecture. However, this assertion of governance through Internet architecture can oversimplify the complex relationship between technology and society. This article argues that human rights are primarily a political and institutional accomplishment, not a simple matter of technical design. By articulating a challenge to uncritical and imperfectly theorized efforts to link standards‐setting and protocol development to “values” and human rights objectives, we hope to foster a more realistic approach to Internet standardization and governance processes and a more balanced and well‐informed theoretical debate. Situated in the theoretical literature on science, technology, and society, our analysis is also informed by extensive empirical exposure to standardization and Internet governance processes. It includes two short case studies in which standards development and rights issues have intersected in ways that illuminate the relationship between rights and standards, and which can be interpreted to falsify certain claims.

Policy strategies for value-based technology standards

“…There is strong and legitimate criticism against explicit connections between technology standards and legal values (Mueller and Badiei, 2019). However, we point out that this connection is already a practical reality.…”

“…This policy is meant to shape how technology is used, created, or de- without policy backing, is not enough. Such an approach may indeed be limited (Mueller and Badiei, 2019). We understand and acknowledge that active policy backing is a necessary component-and in fact also at play in notable policy stan-…”

Predicting the Amount of GDPR Fines

“…Finally, it is necessary to briefly point out the bigger issues affecting the legal mining and data extraction domains-and, therefore, also the present work. Like with the "code is law" notion, which has never existed in reality [16], there are many philosophical counterarguments against the legal mining and data extraction domains [6,7]. It is problematic at best to codify the methodology of a scholarly discipline into rigid schemas in order to nurse the methodological requirements of another discipline; legal reasoning is distinct from other types of reasoning exercised in empirical sciences; and so forth.…”

No Backdoors: Investigating the Dutch Standpoint on Encryption

“…Using both qualitative as well as quantitative data, Sivan‐Sevilla (2018) illustrates that privacy is often lost to national security in the U.S. policy process. Mueller and Badiei (2019) argue that the popular assertion that human rights can be advanced through the design of the Internet's architecture and standards is not borne out by the evidence. Not only can different rights conflict with each other, it remains difficult to foresee how certain technologies will affect these rights, and designers' intentions are often dictated by economic incentives, laws, and policies.…”