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

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.