IGF 2023 Lightning Talk #66 Internet Governance Transparency: a Data Driven Approach

    Time
    Sunday, 8th October, 2023 (02:00 UTC) - Sunday, 8th October, 2023 (02:30 UTC)
    Room
    SC – Room H
    Subtheme

    Global Digital Governance & Cooperation
    Governing Digital Economy
    Harmonising Global Digital Infrastructure
    Multistakeholderism

    co-Chair of the Research and Analysis of Standard-Setting Processes (RASP) Proposed Research Group at the IRTF, technical community / Queen Mary University of London, academia, WEOG
    -Ignacio Castro, co-Chair of the Research and Analysis of Standard-Setting Processes Proposed Research Group (IRTF), Queen Mary University of London, Academia WEOG -Niels ten Oever, co-Chair of the Research and Analysis of Standard-Setting Processes (RASP) Proposed Research Group at the IRTF, technical community / University of Amsterdam, Academia, WEOG -Colin Perkins, IRTF Chair, technical community/University of Glasgow, Academia, WEOG

    Speakers

    Ignacio Castro

    co-Chair of the Research and Analysis of Standard-Setting Processes (RASP) Proposed Research Group at the IRTF, technical community / Queen Mary University of London, academia, WEOG

    Onsite Moderator

    Colin Perkins, IRTF Chair, technical community/University of Glasgow, Academia, WEOG

    Online Moderator

    Niels ten Oever, co-Chair of the Research and Analysis of Standard-Setting Processes (RASP) Proposed Research Group at the IRTF, technical community / University of Amsterdam, Academia, WEOG

    Rapporteur

    Gareth Tyson, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Academia, AP

    SDGs

    8. Decent Work and Economic Growth
    9. Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
    10. Reduced Inequalities
    11. Sustainable Cities and Communities
    12. Responsible Production and Consumption
    13. Climate Action
    16. Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
    17. Partnerships for the Goals

    Targets: SDOs such as the multistakeholder IETF process (17. Partnerships for the Goals; 16. Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) brings together Internet technology developers (8. Decent Work and Economic Growth) from around the world to cooperate in an open forum (10. Reduced Inequalities) on consensus-driven standards (12. Responsible Production and Consumption) for the Internet that are supported by principles including open innovation (9. Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure), considerations of performance and cost (11. Sustainable Cities and Communities; 13. Climate Action) and placing people at the center of its design.

    Format

    Presentation with Q&A

    Duration (minutes)
    30
    Language
    English
    Description

    Standards Developing Organization (SDO) are a manifestation of multistakeholderism and critical for the Internet from both a governance and technical perspective. Technical decisions taken at an SDO can have deep implications for all stakeholders including final users and governments. As such, transparency is paramount. This talk will shed light on ongoing efforts on transparency and analysis of SDOs. This talk will discuss recent findings and quantitative analysis of a rich historical data that reveals how SDOs have changed over time and how their decisions are intertwined with the evolution of the Internet. The talk will focus on one of the most crucial SDOs for the governance of the Internet, the Internet Engineering Task Force. The talk aims at promoting a better understanding of the relevance of SDOs in the governance of the Internet, promoting transparency in the decisions taken by its members as well as to encourage others to use this data for further promoting quantitative analysis. The talk will build on recent publications at some of the most prestigious conferences in their respective are and the recent formation of the Research and Analysis of Standard-Setting Processes (RASP) Proposed Research Group at the IRTF to promote a community of research and analysis in this important area of the Internet and its governance.

    RASP: IRTF Research and Analysis of Standardization Processes (proposed) Research Group  

     

    Background papers:

    Khare, Prashant, Ravi Shekhar, Mladen Karan, Stephen McQuistin, Colin Perkins, Ignacio Castro, Gareth Tyson, Patrick GT Healey, and Matthew Purver. "Tracing Linguistic Markers of Influence in a Large Online Organisation." Association for Computational Linguistics, 2023. [PDF]

    Karan, Mladen, Prashant Khare, Ravi Shekhar, Stephen McQuistin, Ignacio Castro, Gareth Tyson, Colin Perkins, Patrick GT Healey, and Matthew Purver. "An Email Dataset for Analyzing Large-Group Decision-Making." Association for Computational Linguistics findings, 2023. [PDF]

    Khare, Prashant, Mladen Karan, Stephen McQuistin, Colin Perkins, Gareth Tyson, Matthew Purver, Patrick Healey, and Ignacio Castro. "The Web We Weave: Untangling the Social Graph of the IETF." In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 2022. [PDF]

    McQuistin, Stephen, Mladen Karan, Prashant Khare, Colin Perkins, Gareth Tyson, Matthew Purver, Patrick Healey, Waleed Iqbal, Junaid Qadir, and Ignacio Castro. "Characterising the IETF through the lens of RFC deployment." In Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference, 2021. [PDF]

     

    Other RASP related papers:

    Biddle, Brad. “No Standard for Standards: Understanding the ICT Standards Development Ecosystem.” Available at SSRN 3023650, 2016.

    De Vries, Henk, Kai Jakobs, Tineke M. Egyedi, Manabu Eto, Stephan Fertig, Olia Kanevskaia, Louise Klintner, Claudia Koch, Ivana Mijatovic, and Mona Mirtsch. “Standardization: Towards an Agenda for Research.” International Journal of Standardization Research (IJSR) 16, no. 1 (2018): 52–59.

    Biddle, Brad, Frank X. Curci, Matthew Dodson, and Molly Edwards. “Standards Setting Organizations and Trademark Registration: An Empirical Analysis.” Available at SSRN 3386404, 2019.

    ten Oever, N., Milan, S., & Beraldo, D. (2020). Studying Discourse in Internet Governance through Mailing-list Analysis. In D. L. Cogburn, L. DeNardis, N. S. Levinson, & F. Musiani (Eds.), Research Methods in Internet Governance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Doty, Nick. “Enacting Privacy in Internet Standards.” University of California, Berkeley, 2020. https://npdoty.name/enacting-privacy/.

    Kanevskaia, Olia. “Governance of ICT Standardization: Due Process in Technocratic Decision-Making.” NCJ Int’l L. 45 (2020): 549. Kanevskaia, Olia. "The need for multi-disciplinary education about standardization." In Sustainable Development, pp. 161-178. Springer, Cham, 2020.

    Cath, Corinne. “The Technology We Choose to Create: Human Rights Advocacy in the Internet Engineering Task Force.” Telecommunications Policy, Norm entrepreneurship in Internet Governance, 45, no. 6 (July 1, 2021): 102144.

    Nanni, Riccardo. “Digital Sovereignty and Internet Standards: Normative Implications of Public-Private Relations among Chinese Stakeholders in the Internet Engineering Task Force.” Information, Communication & Society 0, no. 0 (October 1, 2022): 1–21.

    Bergsen, Pepijn, Carolina Caeiro, Harriet Moynihan, Marianne Schneider-Petsinger, and Isabella Wilkinson. “Digital Trade and Digital Technical Standards,” 2022.

    Sinha, Priyanka, Ritu Patel, Pabitra Mitra, Dilys Thomas, and Lipika Dey. “Mining Homophilic Groups of Users Using Edge Attributed Node Embedding from Enterprise Social Networks.” In Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2022, 1139–47, 2022.

     

    Key Takeaways (* deadline at the end of the session day)

    Take away 1) Standardisation is open but not necessarily accessible: standardisation is a complex process where participation and understanding of its decisions and implications involves technical understanding and time availability.

    Take away 2) Analysis of the large amount of open data produced by standardisation organisations offers an opportunity to facilitate access to stakeholders within and beyond the technical community.

    Call to Action (* deadline at the end of the session day)

    Call for action 1) More analysis of the data generated by standardisation organisations will benefit the interplay between the different stakeholders of the Internet and beyond the technical community

    Call for action 2) for other Internet gobernance communities to embrace data openess and thee analysis of its data to help bridge the gap across stakeholders and foster understanding and informed dialogue

    Session Report (* deadline 9 January) - click on the ? symbol for instructions

    Standards Developing Organization (SDO) are a manifestation of multistakeholderism and critical for the Internet from both a governance and technical perspective. Technical decisions taken at an SDO can have deep implications for all Internet stakeholders. Many SDOs (eg, IETF, W3C) are very transparent in the decisions and debates that lead to the development of standards.

    Greater analysis of the data produced by standardisation organisations is an opportunity for better Internet gobernance. Greater analysis of this rich data can facilitate the interplay from the different stakeholders and make complex technical debates more accessible to other stakeholders.

    The IRTF Research and Analysis of Standardization Processes (proposed) Research Group promotes, debates and hosts this type of work.