Taking the High Route - the Internet routing architecture and human rights

This talk happened on March 26, 2020 with Niels Ten Oever.

• Niels Ten Oever, PHD Candidate at University of Amsterdam presented. He is about to finish his PHd researching routing infrastructure, which governs our everyday lives, but we never think about it. It sets invisible rules for our lives. This is understudied in social sciences but it is very researchable

• Internet infrastructure is idealized or forgotten and it is used as a tool to achieve certain policy goals

• There is no central authority. Infrastructure is distributed and quite resilient. However, change is hard to achieve without a central authority. Voluntary agreements or standards are made in different bodies

• Niels is studying how are norms and values represented in these different governing networks.

• Internet governing bodies are built to build interconnection. They will refuse or reject anything that interferes with this goal. They are not good ascribing societal norms but rather good at bringing independent networks together

• We dont know what 5g will bring. However, frustrations with multi-stakeholder internet governance is leading to new developments.

• 5g sounds is a great marketing term because it sounds like its an evolution of what we had before 3g, etc, but its not the case. ITs not only going to be different but cover more layers. It will bring out role out new networking hardware that will also bring new paradigms.

• Currently, 4g is 23 different standards but we don't know what implementation means, since only 3 have been agreed upon. What we do know is that will bring new networking paradigm and different atenna techniques. It will also allow entities to replace internet protocols with their own proprietary protocols. These entities dont feel they need to build a network since most traffic going to only a few content providers

• If you look at a ITF, the average age is very old and northern American and northern European. Standard bodies don’t reflect diversity of internet users. In addition, any positive intention to fix diversity is thrown out the window once they encounter technical problems. Internet is intolerant of non-latin script. and not optimized for non-english languages. Governing bodies and standards are also based on US and European norms/values. GDPR has become the privacy standard for the whole world. Europe becomes the arbitrary fo other parts of the world. This is the tussle! who is setting the rules for what, and what is the right interface.

• The internet was not a commercial project - it started as a was a public project. Up to 1993 commercial traffic was not allowed. All the risks etc was paid by public money, commercial money only came in when we needed to scale. Now we are entering into a new phase that may require new governance bodies.

Reading List:

Books

Open Standards in a Digital Age

The Digital Sublime

Internet Imagineer

From Counterculture to Cyber Culture

Articles

https://www.derechosdigitales.org/14268/la-lucha-de-genero-en-los-protocolos-de-internet/


https://www.derechosdigitales.org/12908/protocolos-para-una-internet-libre-y-segura/