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The Global War for Internet Governance
By LAURA DENARDIS Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Laura DeNardis
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-18135-7
CHAPTER 1
The Internet Governance Oxymoron
INTERNET GOVERNANCE CONFLICTS are the new spaces where political and economic power is unfolding in the twenty-first century. Technologies of Internet governance increasingly mediate civil liberties such as freedom of expression and individual privacy. They are entangled with the preservation of national security and the arbitration of digital commerce and innovation. The diffuse nature of Internet governance technologies is shifting historic control over these public interest areas from traditional nation-state bureaucracy to private ordering and new global institutions. Many of these governance functions are technically and institutionally complicated and therefore out of public view. Yet how conflicts over Internet governance are settled will determine some of the most important public interest issues of our time.
The term "Internet governance" conjures up a host of seemingly unrelated global controversies such as the prolonged Internet outage in Egypt during political turmoil or Google's decision not to acquiesce to U.S. government requests to completely remove an incendiary political video from YouTube. It invokes media narratives about the United Nations trying to "take over" the Internet, cybersecurity concerns such as denial of ser vice attacks, and the mercurial privacy policies of social media companies. These issues exist only at the surface of a technologically concealed and institutionally complex ecosystem of governance.
The escalation of Internet control debates into the public consciousness presents a unique moment of opportunity for a treatise on Internet governance. One objective of this book is to explain how the Internet is already governed, particularly through the sinews of power that exist in the architectures and global institutions of Internet governance. There are significant discontinuities between media and policymaker accounts of Internet control and how the Internet is run in practice. Written from the standpoint of an engineer, this book provides the requisite technical and historical background for understanding these practices. Also written from the standpoint of a scholar of science and technology studies (STS), this book constructs a conceptual framework of Internet governance that extends well beyond traditional institution-bound accounts of the policies of sovereign nation states and international agreements to account for the rising privatization of global power and the embedded politics of technical architecture. Questions of governance at these control points are questions of technical and economic efficiency but also expressions of mediation over societal values such as security, individual liberty, innovation policy, and intellectual property rights. Global Internet governance controversies are brewing over how to balance these values. A primary impetus for this book is the need to bring these controversies into the public consciousness and explain the connection between the future of Internet governance and the future of expressive and economic liberty.
Most Internet governance struggles are very complex, even those that have exploded in full view of the mainstream media or have involved mass online collective action. One such episode featured a massive online boycott led by Internet technology companies. Thousands of web sites went dark or altered their opening screens to protest antipiracy legislation moving through the U.S. Congress. Wikipedia blacked out its popular English-language site for twenty-four hours, instead displaying a banner reading "Imagine a World without Free Knowledge." Reddit, Boing Boing, and thousands of other popular sites blocked access to their content. Google blacked out its famous doodle logo on its opening search screen. Internet advocacy efforts cumulatively gathered more than ten million petition signatures, and Congress was inundated with phone calls. This historic protest and mass Internet boycott was a response to two proposed bills, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA) and the "Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act" (PROTECT IP Act, or PIPA). These legislative efforts targeted the illegal online trafficking of copyrighted media and counterfeit goods. Their antipiracy objectives initially garnered broad bipartisan support in the House and Senate. The bills would heighten criminal penalties for intellectual property rights violations such as illegally streaming pirated movies. The proposed legislation would also enable law enforcement and intellectual property rights holders to demand that search engines cease providing links to infringing web sites, that Internet ser vice providers block access to these sites, and that financial ser vices companies and advertising firms cease directing payments or serving ads to these sites.
Popular domain name registrar Go Daddy had been one of the Internet companies publicly supporting SOPA. This support triggered its own global backlash against Go Daddy, with a number of customers initiating domain name transfers to other registrars. The company eventually reversed its position and deleted previously released company blog postings supporting the legislation.
The object of the Internet boycott was not the antipiracy intent of the proposed legislation. Rather, the boycotts challenged the mechanisms of how the antipiracy goals would be executed. The bills would have altered various aspects of the Internet's technical, cultural, and institutional norms. Some Internet freedom advocates warned that the bill might make companies like Google liable for copyright infringement on their sites and enable law enforcement to order the removal of web sites containing nothing more than a hyperlink to other sites hosting pirated content. Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian warned that the legislation would "obliterate an entire tech industry." Other concerns focused on economic trade freedom, such as the provisions that would have required financial intermediaries including credit card companies and advertisers to cease doing business with a site that a content company claimed was violating its intellectual property rights.
The legislative effort also raised technical concerns by proposing enforcement mechanisms that might alter the Internet's technical operation and possibly compromise its security and stability. This concern involved one of the fundamental technologies of Internet governance, the Domain Name System (DNS) that translates between the alphanumeric names that humans use, such as twitter .com, and the binary addresses computers use to route information to its destination. The universally consistent resolution of unique names into unique numbers is a basic mechanism keeping the Internet operational. This resolution process is overseen by institutions called Internet registries. An authoritative registry manages the centralized database mapping names into numbers for each top-level domain such as .com or .edu. For example, the corporation VeriSign operates the .com domain, among others. The registry propagates an authoritative file mapping names into numbers to other so-called "recursive servers" of network operators, such as Internet ser vice providers, to create a universal and standardized mechanism for consistently resolving domain names into Internet addresses regardless of physical geography or jurisdiction.
The proposed legislation included DNS filtering provisions that would have required Internet ser vice providers to filter and redirect traffic away from web sites by altering the authoritative information it receives from registries. In other words, an Internet ser vice provider would be obliged to resolve a domain name into a different binary address than the global Internet universally dictates, presumably redirecting it to a web site with a law enforcement message. National governments already have the ability to order authoritative registries under their jurisdictions to block access to the domain names under their control. But they do not have this jurisdiction in a top-level domain controlled by a foreign registry. Hence, governments have an interest in ordering network operators within their own jurisdictions to modify the standard domain name resolution process to block web sites. This modification from a hierarchical and consistent system to a series of inconsistent resolution approaches would erode the traditional universality of domain names and potentially complicate the global security and administration of the Internet's infrastructure, transforming the Internet from a universal infrastructure to one that varies from country to country.
During the legislative deliberations about the proposed modifications to Internet governance structures, it became clear that some policymakers were unfamiliar both with how basic technologies of Internet governance work and with how global coordination works among the institutions that manage these systems. Considering the complexity of these technological and institutional frameworks, this might not be surprising. But legislators also dismissed the concerns of leading technical experts. Roll Call reported that one of the sponsors of SOPA was generally dismissive of criticism of the bill as "completely hypothetical" and suggested that "none of it is based in reality."
Eighty-three prominent Internet engineers, including TCP/IP inventor Vinton Cerf, Paul Vixie, the author of BIND (DNS server software), and other respected technologists who have contributed to essential Internet protocols, submitted a letter to Congress warning that the potentially catastrophic bill would "risk fragmenting the Internet's Domain Name System," "engender censorship," create "fear and uncertainty for technological innovation," and "seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure." Some of the most respected Internet security experts, including Internet pioneer Steve Crocker, had also written a white paper entitled "Security and Other Technical Concerns Raised by the DNS Filtering Requirements in the PROTECT IP Bill" asserting that the web site redirection provisions were inconsistent with an important security protocol known as Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC).
The concerns expressed by Internet engineering experts were in themselves insufficient to stop the progression of SOPA and PIPA, which retained bipartisan support and had the vocal backing of mainstream media corporations and powerful lobbies from pharmaceutical, motion picture, and music industries. But opposition to the bills continued to gather momentum. Leading Internet engineers opposed the bills. Advocacy groups such as the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and Public Knowledge, among others, vocally opposed the bills and conducted forceful information dissemination campaigns. Media coverage escalated, first in the tech media and eventually in more mainstream media sources. Opposition to the bills finally escalated into the online blackouts of prominent Internet companies and the weight of millions of citizens enlisted by private companies and advocacy groups to sign petitions.
Cumulatively, these efforts changed the framing of the debate from bipartisan antipiracy objectives to two different framings: a "don't break the Internet" framing and an "Internet freedom" framing concerned about censorship and prior restraint on speech. This Internet governance confrontation was grounded in a real technological and social concern but was also culturally constructed and discursively escalated by forces with a significant interest in the outcome.
In response to online petitions, the White House issued an official response stating, "We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global internet." The statement further noted that laws "must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS), a foundation of Internet security. Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and ser vices accessible online."
Also in the wake of unprecedented online protests and blackouts, several sponsors of the legislation withdrew their support. Ultimately, leaders in the House and Senate decided to table action on the previously fast-moving bills until open issues could be resolved. SOPA and PIPA were killed, at least for the time being.
This Internet governance affair was atypical in playing out on a public stage but was typical in that it involved multiple stakeholders—media industries, Internet industries, private citizens, traditional governance structures, Internet registries, engineers from standards-setting institutions, and cybersecurity experts. It played out locally in the United States but would have had sweeping global implications. Topically, it touched on many of the issues this book addresses: freedom of expression online, Internet infrastructure security and stability, the policy role of Internet companies, the efficacy of Internet protocols, globally coordinated Internet control systems such as the DNS, and the relationship between intellectual property rights enforcement and Internet architecture. These are the issues at the heart of global Internet governance.
GLOBAL INTERNET GOVERNANCE IN THEORY
The primary task of Internet governance involves the design and administration of the technologies necessary to keep the Internet operational and the enactment of substantive policy around these technologies. This technical architecture includes layer upon layer of systems including Internet technical standards; critical Internet resources such as the binary addresses necessary to access the Internet; the DNS; systems of information intermediation such as search engines and financial transaction networks; and network-level systems such as Internet access, Internet exchange points, and Internet security intermediaries. The following sections suggest five features of global Internet governance that will serve as a conceptual framework for this book: how arrangements of technical architecture are arrangements of power; the propensity to use Internet governance technologies as a proxy for content control; the privatization of Internet governance; how Internet points of control serve as sites of global conflict over competing values; and the tension between local geopolitics and collective action problems in Internet globalization.
Arrangements of Technical Architecture as Arrangements of Power
The complex institutional and technical scaffolding of Internet governance is somewhat behind the scenes and not visible to users in the same way applications and content are visible. Although these technologies lie beneath content, they nevertheless instantiate political and cultural tensions. They embed design decisions that shape social and economic structures ranging from individual civil liberties to global innovation policy. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star have explained that "Inverting our commonsense notion of infrastructure means taking what have often been seen as behind the scenes, boring, background processes to the real work of politics and knowledge production and bringing their contribution to the foreground." Bringing infrastructures of Internet governance to the foreground reveals the politics of this architecture.
An influential collection of scholarship has examined large-scale technological systems through the lens of the politics of technical architecture, beginning at least in 1980 with political theorist Langdon Winner's avant-garde piece "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" Winner explained, "At issue is the claim that the machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions to efficiency and productivity and their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority."
A naive view of technology governance would suggest that public authorities establish objectives for large-scale systems and then technical experts and coordinators implement these social goals in the design and administration of systems. This view of governance fails to consider the direct influence of forces with an economic or political stake in the design and administration of technologies, the influence of user communities and markets, and the inevitable unintended outcomes of systems of design and administration. Sheila Jasanoff's theory of co-production has emphasized how technology and social order are produced contemporaneously. This is a useful model that avoids the extremes of both technological and social determinism. Technology "embeds and is embedded in social practices, identities, norms, conventions, discourses, instruments, and institutions—in short, in all the building blocks of what we term the social."
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Excerpted from The Global War for Internet Governance by LAURA DENARDIS. Copyright © 2014 Laura DeNardis. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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