Laura DeNardis

HIDDEN LEVERS OF INTERNET CONTROL

Battles over the control of information online are often fought at the level of Internet infrastructure. Forces of globalization and technological change have diminished the capacity of sovereign nation states and media content producers to directly control information flows. This loss of control over content and the failure of laws and markets to regain this control have redirected political and economic battles into the realm of infrastructure and, in particular, technologies of Internet governance. These arrangements of technical architecture are also arrangements of power. This shift of power to infrastructure is drawing renewed attention to the politics of Internet architecture and the legitimacy of the coordinating institutions and private ordering that create and administer these infrastructures. It also raises questions related to freedom of expression in the context of this increasing turn to infrastructure to control information. This article explores the relationship between governance and infrastructure, focusing on three specific examples of how battles over content have shifted into the realm of this Internet governance infrastructure: the use of the Internets domain name system for intellectual property rights enforcement; the use of ‘kill-switch’ approaches to restrict the flow of information; and the termination of infrastructure services to WikiLeaks. The article concludes with some thoughts about the implications of this infrastructure-mediated governance for economic and expressive liberties.

Multistakeholderism: anatomy of an inchoate global institution

Building on John Ruggie’s pioneering study of multilateralism, this paper presents an analogous study of multistakeholder governance, or multistakeholderism. Its central argument is that multistakeholderism is, as yet, a much less well-defined institutional form. Cases exhibit significant variation both in the combinations of actor classes entitled to participate and the nature of authority relations among those actors. The first section discusses multistakeholderism as an institutional form, and proposes a taxonomy of its types. This section also briefly addresses the implications of the analysis for International Relations theory. The paper then conducts a comparative analysis of multistakeholderism, applying the taxonomy to five illustrative cases. It demonstrates the degree of inter-case variation, and the range of issue-areas across which the institutional form is employed and invoked by actors. Three cases are drawn from the increasingly contentious area of Internet governance; the paper thus makes a secondary contribution to this growing literature. The paper’s most striking finding in this regard is that Internet governance often fails to live up to its multistakeholder rhetoric. Other cases include governance of securities regulation and the governance of corporate social responsibility. The paper concludes by examining the implications of our argument, and identifying areas for further research.

Thinking Clearly About Multistakeholder Internet Governance

Efforts to study and practice Internet governance start, virtually without exception, from the premise that the Internet is governed by an innovative, unusual (perhaps unique) ‘multistakeholder’ model. Preserving that model is a primary goal for the broader Internet community as well as for many governments, though not for all. Viewing multistakeholderism as a teleological goal for Internet governance creates several problems. First, multistakeholderism is often elevated as a value in itself rather than as a possible approach to meeting more salient public interest objectives such as preserving Internet interoperability, stability, security, and openness. Second, multistakeholder governance may not be appropriate in every functional area of Internet governance. Internet coordination is not a monolithic practice but rather a multilayered series of tasks of which some are appropriately relegated to the private sector, some the purview of traditional nation-state governance or international treaty negotiations, and some more appropriately multistakeholder. It is a misnomer to speak not only of multistakeholder governance but also of Internet governance as a single thing. The concept of multistakeholderism can also serve as a proxy for broader political struggles or be deployed as an impediment to the types of Internet coordination necessary to promote conditions of responsible governance. For example, governments with repressive information policies can advocate for top-down and formalized multistakeholderism to gain additional power in areas in which they have traditionally not had jurisdiction. These types of efforts can result in multilateral rather than multistakeholder approaches with non-governmental actors limited from participating in formal deliberations and lacking any meaningful voting power. Alternatively, companies and other actors with vested interests in current governance arrangements can deploy multistakeholderism in a manner either meant to exclude new entrants (whether public or private) with incommensurate interests and values or to preserve incumbent market advantage.This paper suggests that multistakeholderism should not be viewed as a value in itself applied homogenously to all Internet governance functions. Rather, the appropriate approach to responsible Internet governance requires determining what types of administration are optimal for promoting a balance of interoperability, innovation, free expression and operational stability in any particular functional and political context. Doing so requires conceptual and theoretical tools that have not yet been developed. Accordingly, the paper proceeds in three parts. First, it presents a more granular taxonomy and understanding of Internet governance functions – differentiating between, for example, cybersecurity governance, Internet standards setting, and the policymaking function of private information intermediaries. Second, it performs the same task of disaggregation with respect to multistakeholderism. It presents distinct varieties of multistakeholder Internet governance (which differ according to the varieties of actors involved and the nature of authority relations between them) and sets these arrangements in a broader context of modalities for accomplishing global governance in other issue areas. Such an approach contributes both to the study and practice of Internet governance, and to scholarship in International Relations and global governance.

The Internet Design Tension between Surveillance and Security

The design tension between security and surveillance has existed for decades. This article specifically examines the protocol design tension between national security interests in surveillance versus network security in the early decades of the Internet and its predecessor networks. Using archival research and protocol-specific case studies, this article describes episodes in which the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) assessed whether to build wiretapping capability into protocols, made specific engineering decisions regarding security and surveillance, and entered broader global debates about encryption strength and government policies to institute cryptographic controls that facilitate surveillance. This study reveals that, even as protocol design has continuously evolved and adapted to changing political, socioeconomic, and technological contexts, the Internet engineering community has consistently staked out a consensus position pushing back against technologically based indiscriminate government surveillance.

Internet control points as LGBT rights mediation

ABSTRACT Conflicts over lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights, similar to other social struggles, are increasingly materializing within technical functions of Internet governance and architecture rather than at the surface level of content. This paper examines how various functional areas of Internet governance, such as the assignment of domain names, the policy-making role of private information intermediaries, and intellectual property rights enforcement mechanisms serve as control points over LGBT speech, identity expression, and community formation. This turn to Internet governance control points to mediate LGBT rights has implications for public policy, for scholarship at the intersection of Internet governance and human rights, and for media companies and activists in their work of shaping infrastructures that can promote free expression and human rights.

A history of internet security

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the history of Internet vulnerabilities and solutions within the social milieu in which question whether the Internet will ever be secure was raised. The Internet and its predecessor networks evolved in an era devoid of home Internet access or personal computers and in a closed and trusted user environment predominantly in academic, research, and military contexts in the United States. Network security was important but did not have the same complexity it later assumed when the network expanded into business environments, across the globe, into homes, and over the open airwaves of wireless. A watershed event occurred in the fall of 1988 when a self-propagating computer program disrupted or crashed thousands of Internet-connected computers. Since this attack, security incidents and challenges—such as worms, viruses, wireless vulnerabilities, denial of service attacks, spam, identity theft, and spyware—have increased annually even while national economies and national security operations have become increasingly dependent on the Internet.

Governance by Infrastructure

Injured victims of a Hamas-planned suicide bombing in Jerusalem were awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation from Iran in a 2014 US court action because of the Iranian government’s support of Hamas. As part of a decade-long effort to collect damages, the plaintiffs asked the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to seize the country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) of Iran, as well as North Korea and Syria, and turn them over to the plaintiffs. For a variety of technical, political, and legal reasons, ICANN pushed back against “seizing” ccTLDs and handing them over as compensation in a civil lawsuit (ICANN, 2014).

Interoperability and democracy: A political basis for open document standards

This paper employs democratic theory as a method of inquiry into the political implications of openness in information and communication technology (ICT) standards. Our account describes four ways in which ICT standards have political implications in democratic societies: standards can have implications for other democratic processes; standards can affect the broader social conditions relevant to democracy; the content and material implications of standards can themselves constitute substantive political issues; and lastly, the internal processes of standards-setting can be viewed politically. After providing examples of these political implications, we examine various conceptions of openness in ICT standards and describe a maximal definition of openness as a conceptual pole that anchors one end of the spectrum of potential standards policy options. We then develop some guidelines as to the contexts in which democratic values require a greater degree of openness in both the substance of technical standards and their development. In particular, we examine the function of documents and document formats in democratic governments and suggest that movements toward open document standards are highly beneficial in democratic societies.

The politicization of the Internet’s Domain Name System: Implications for Internet security, universality, and freedom

One of the most contentious and longstanding debates in Internet governance involves the question of oversight of the Domain Name System (DNS). DNS administration is sometimes described as a “clerical” or “merely technical” task, but it also implicates a number of public policy concerns such as trademark disputes, infrastructure stability and security, resource allocation, and freedom of speech. A parallel phenomenon involves governmental and private forces increasingly altering or co-opting the DNS for political and economic purposes distinct from its core function of resolving Internet names into numbers. This article examines both the intrinsic politics of the DNS in its operation and specific examples and techniques of co-opting or altering DNS’ technical infrastructure as a new tool of global power. The article concludes with an analysis of the implications of this infrastructure-mediated governance on network security, architectural stability, and the efficacy of the Internet governance ecosystem.