The design of the internet’s architecture by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and human rights

The debate on whether and how the Internet can protect and foster human rights has become a defining issue of our time. This debate often focuses on Internet governance from a regulatory perspective, underestimating the influence and power of the governance of the Internet's architecture. The technical decisions made by Internet Standard Developing Organisations (SDOs) that build and maintain the technical infrastructure of the Internet influences how information flows. They rearrange the shape of the technically mediated public sphere, including which rights it protects and which practices it enables. In this article, we contribute to the debate on SDOs' ethical responsibility to bring their work in line with human rights. We defend three theses. First, SDOs' work is inherently political. Second, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), one of the most influential SDOs, has a moral obligation to ensure its work is coherent with, and fosters, human rights. Third, the IETF should enable the actualisation of human rights through the protocols and standards it designs by implementing a responsibility-by-design approach to engineering. We conclude by presenting some initial recommendations on how to ensure that work carried out by the IETF may enable human rights

Ethics of Artificial Intelligence Demarcations

In this paper we present a set of key demarcations, particularly important when discussing ethical and societal issues of current AI research and applications. Properly distinguishing issues and concerns related to Artificial General Intelligence and weak AI, between symbolic and connectionist AI, AI methods, data and applications are prerequisites for an informed debate. Such demarcations would not only facilitate much-needed discussions on ethics on current AI technologies and research. In addition sufficiently establishing such demarcations would also enhance knowledge-sharing and support rigor in interdisciplinary research between technical and social sciences.Comment: Proceedings of the Norwegian AI Symposium 2019 (NAIS 2019), Trondheim, Norwa

Artificial intelligence and the ‘Good Society’: the US, EU, and UK approach

In October 2016, the White House, the European Parliament, and the UK House of Commons each issued a report outlining their visions on how to prepare society for the widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI). In this article, we provide a comparative assessment of these three reports in order to facilitate the design of policies favourable to the development of a 'good AI society'. To do so, we examine how each report addresses the following three topics: (a) the development of a 'good AI society'; (b) the role and responsibility of the government, the private sector, and the research community (including academia) in pursuing such a development; and (c) where the recommendations to support such a development may be in need of improvement. Our analysis concludes that the reports address adequately various ethical, social, and economic topics, but come short of providing an overarching political vision and long-term strategy for the development of a 'good AI society'. In order to contribute to fill this gap, in the conclusion we suggest a two-pronged approach

IF NOT, ELSE: STANDARDS, PROTOCOLS, NETWORKS AND HOW THEY MAKE A DIFFERENCE

The contemporary Internet's "network of networks" has become infrastructural to our lives. The Internet is a stack of physical, data link, network, transport, and application layers which all have unique rules and roles. While many see Internet infrastructure as a foregone conclusion, Paris, Cath and Myers West (2023) write “Internet infrastructure is built slowly, over time, protocol by protocol, in response to many different technical, social, political, environmental, and economic imperatives”. Even as the particular model of the Internet we are all accustomed to has become the standard, other attempts proliferated and eventually failed, as did the Soviet Internet (Peters 2016), and as this panel highlights, the Internet is still ever-evolving. The project of this panel is to trace alternative, parallel, and emergent network models, standards and protocols, theorize their impact as they appear in different places, spaces, and contexts, and gesture towards how the Internet might be different. As critical internet studies have since the early 2000s shown, computational standards, protocols, and network diagrams are more than technical details, they have the power to shape and structure the conditions for our socio-cultural lifeworlds (Galloway 2006; Chun 2008; Bratton 2016). As Gehl (2014) puts it: “interfaces, database structures, mechanisms of connection all shape social activities”. Change an element in the stack and a different connectivity, a different future becomes possible. The papers of this panel introduce and discuss five different and potentially revolutionary network technologies that manage and organize our online lives. The first paper represents a media genealogy of ActivityPub – a protocol that enables the Fediverse, a collection of social media sites that can communicate with one another. The author argues that ActivityPub was not produced through an instrumental process, but was the result of accidents and coincidences. The accidental nature of the protocol, coupled with its being authored by self-identified queer and trans developers, has put it on a collision course with both the “standard” approach to standards production as well as mainstream, corporate social media. The second paper focuses on the design of the Interplanetary Internet and the idea of delay-tolerant networking fundamental to operating in outer space. The author maintains that when delays are central to a network model, we are forced to rethink how our connections are maintained and organized in the future. Delay-tolerant networking is thus not only a technical solution for a communications system but a control protocol through which interplanetary life can be managed. The third paper is also focused on the temporality of networks. The third paper examines how time is enacted as a design ideology in the course of the development of a future internet architecture protocol project: named data networking (NDN). This work locates aspects of the sociomateriality of time in the processes of building Internet infrastructure and demonstrates how it binds together cultural, economic, and discursive power. The paper argues that thinking through time as a design ideology can be useful in projects imagining how the Internet might be built to engender and support different values than market ideology. The fourth paper is about the organizational culture of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a key internet standards and protocol organization. The paper argues that the organization is guided by a culturally inflected anti-political engineering ethos, whose depoliticizing tendencies hampers the organization’s functioning and its ability to rise above narrow industry-interest and pursue a public interest internet. The fifth paper looks to the Crypto Wars of the 1990s as a moment where things could have been otherwise; comparing the examples of PGP and RSA encryption software and how they shaped the nature of our networked systems. It argues that a combination of regulatory and commercial interests influenced the development and use of cryptography in ways that facilitated the development of e-commerce, but left private messaging in dubious legal status. Collectively the papers investigate alternative and emergent trends behind the Internet and its network models, standards, and protocols. The protocols and rules for network connection, standards bodies, and modes of governance are critical to maintaining and upkeeping a network. Their impact, however, is not merely technical but potentially world-changing. The papers direct their critical gaze towards the development of these technologies and what their introduction to our world potentially entails. By focusing on projects of past, present, and future and by exploring the Internet’s deepest sociotechnical layers, the panel critically dismantles the commonly-held idea that the Internet is a monolith and illustrates that the history of the Internet is still being written

The need for multi-disciplinary education about standardization

In the modern world of rapid and continuous industrial development, standardization plays a considerable role in shaping the global economy. Standards establish quality benchmarks, resolve connectivity problems, fuel innovation and by this means, enable technological advancement and facilitate international commerce. Standards come in a bewildering variety of forms and types and affect various areas of activities, often causing misunderstandings between, inter alia, engineers, economists and lawyers. Although currently ignored, such cross-sectoral misapprehensions may negatively impact standardization in the long run. In this regard, a relevant point to consider is the intertwining of different sectors and activities in the wake of growing digitalization. To grapple with the technical and regulatory challenges arising from this industry shift, an increased understanding of different standardization areas is required. Taking a legal perspective, this contribution describes experiences of incomprehension and misunderstanding when discussing various standardization issues with economists, software developers and mechanical engineers. It emphasizes the importance of cross-sectoral education on standardization for generating a constructive dialogue between different experts. The contribution concludes that increased awareness of various standardization domains enables experts to learn from each other and facilitates their cooperation within different sectors, pacing standardization to the needs of industry and society