Changing minds and machines: a case study of human rights advocacy in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

Thesis

Below the visible aspects of social media and other Internet applications lies a vast infrastructure, where opaque organisations and unaccountable technologists exercise significant power over the Internet. This dissertation is a first-hand anthropological study of how the culture of one such important organisation, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), influences infrastructural politics thereby shaping the development of technology across the Internet. I propose a framework for ‘Critical Internet Governance’ to focus on the cultural forces shaping Internet governance and which groups have the power to define it.

My dissertation asks: What role does IETF culture play in its infrastructural politics? To answer this question, I conducted an ethnographic case study of human rights advocates working in the IETF. My findings draw on three years of ethnographic fieldwork (2017—2020), archival work, and 65 interviews.

Through this case study, my research demonstrates how the IETF’s conservative protocol politics and narrow network imaginaries shape the overall development of the Internet. Displaying what I call ‘engineered innocence’, IETF technologists primarily intervene in human rights’ matters when their culturally particular political commitments are threatened. My empirical chapters make this case by focussing on three interrelated aspects of the IETF: its organisational culture, its exclusionary working practices and how they affect the reception of human rights values, and how the IETF’s imaginaries shape engineers’ narrow understanding of responsibility for the technology ‘they choose to create’.

Throughout this research, I document the cultural specificity of Internet standardisation to complicate current theorising in Internet governance that postulates a ‘turn to the infrastructure’ and dismisses human rights’ efforts without cultural analysis. This dissertation supports the development of theoretical and policy frameworks that define corporate responsibility in digitally distributed systems and hold Internet governance organisations, and their participants, accountable for the power they exercise.

Authors: Cath, C

• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: ASCII and English
• Keywords: Network Imaginaries; Protocol Politics; Internet infrastructure; Ethnography; Civil Society; Big Tech; Internet Engineering Task Force; Public Interest Technologists; Standards; Engineering Culture; Human Rights; Power; Internet Governance; Civil Society; Business and Human Rights
• Subjects: Cultural Anthropology; Internet; Social movements; Internet governance; Ethnography of Internet Governance; Business and Human Rights; Balance of power