Implementing an Internet Bill of Rights

The U. S. Constitution’s first ten amendments make up what is called the Bill of Rights.  These guarantee freedom of religion, of the press, the right to a speedy and public trial, and other rights that were not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution itself.  As I was sitting in on a telecommunications class taught by industry expert Andres Carvallo last week, he speculated about something that I’m going to call an Internet bill of rights.  It doesn’t exist yet, and there are good technical and economic reasons to suspect it never will, but it’s a great idea and deserves airing.

Right now, your rights online are a hodge-podge of hundreds or maybe thousands of legal boilerplate agreements that you’ve checked that you agree to, probably by lying that you have read and understood them.  As I mentioned recently, this is a nasty little piece of hypocrisy that nevertheless is forced on anyone who deals with computers or the Internet.  But legally, your rights online are nothing more than the sum total of all the incomprehensible technical gobbledegook of those fine-print agreements, plus any applicable laws of the municipality, county, state, or country you happen to live in.  

And that’s just the stuff you are entitled to know about.  Internet companies sometimes do things with your data that they don’t admit to in their agreements, and the only way we find out about such things is through news reports of data breaches and underhanded dealings.  Such is the fragmented state of online rights today.

Carvallo’s vision is this:  you, the individual user, get to say exactly what your online privacy and other rights are.  If you don’t want anybody sending you ads for stuff you view online, you can say so. If you don’t want companies accumulating data about your eight-year-old daughter when she uses a toy that’s connected to the Internet, you can say so.  And if you’re on social media platforms, you don’t have to figure out each one’s arcane permissions structure individually.  You just state your preferences once for all in a centralized location, and everybody you deal with has to follow the rules you set up.  

Now this notion may not be original to Carvallo.  But it’s the first time I’ve heard of such a concept, and it’s very appealing.  It would also be very hard to implement, but as he spoke in the context of teaching an engineering class, he encouraged the students to think of future technical possibilities, of which this was one.

You could push this even farther, to the extent of being able to say what ads you do and don’t see.  Google has been making a feeble effort in this direction for some time, in that when I close an ad that’s popped up in the middle of some article I’m reading, I will sometimes get a Google Ads option to say whether I never want to see that ad again and why.  But this is only a tiny step in the direction of the comprehensive vision of personal control that an Internet bill of rights would involve.

Of course, the reason most of the Internet is free is because there are ads. And having the privilege of saying no to some or all ads would mean that for you, anyway, the companies would have to find some other way to make money.  And they’re not about to do that, not if the present system works for them. 

Pay-for-viewing websites are a step in this direction.  In my limited experience, they seem mainly to be operated by newspapers and other old-school media who are striving to maintain some vestige of the old subscription model that worked for so many decades for physical newspapers and magazines.  So something like this can work, but only within the context of a single organization. Fixing things so no matter what you looked at, you’d never see ads anywhere on the Internet is presently almost unimaginable, although I suppose somebody could come up with some kind of shell or filter gizmo that might do that.

Which brings us to the technical question of how an Internet bill of rights could be implemented.  My answer is, I have no idea.  But anything that has to work with any website you go to, would have to be built into the very structure of the Internet, and that means global standards and protocols. When strictly technical problems come up, such as running out of IP addresses or something like that, the world’s engineers have figured out a pretty efficient and effective way of forming working groups, hashing out a technical solution, and agreeing on a standard that implements it.  

But this only works for technical matters.  Things that threaten to affect an industry’s bottom line drastically are not suitable for the technical standards-setting mechanism. And an Internet bill of rights such as we’re discussing would be viewed as a threat by most online for-profit entities. 

In that case, we’d have to get into the political, social, and economic aspects of the problem.  And you’re not going to solve those kinds of matters with merely a working group of engineers.  Something like the United Nations or its International Telecommunications Union might have to be involved, but again, they primarily handle technical matters. Because of the international nature of the Internet, an effective implementation of an Internet bill of rights would have to be agreed on worldwide.  And getting the world to agree on something even as simple as what time it is, can be a hard thing to do, let alone a matter affecting the online activities of everybody on earth.

Well, we’ve traveled from one classroom in San Marcos, Texas to the whole Internet in one column.  I don’t think we’re any closer to having an Internet bill of rights than we were when we started. But it’s a nice idea, and I thank Andres Carvallo for bringing it up.  And if you’re optimistic, maybe you think that this won’t be the last time you read about it.

Internet Technical Governance: ICANN Says "I can," But Can It?

At a time when politics seems to have gotten into everything, like sand after a trip to the beach, it's not too surprising to hear that Senator Ted Cruz and some state attorneys general have seized upon a largely technical issue involving the Internet domain name system (DNS), specifically the transfer of supervision from the U. S. Department of Commerce to an independent non-profit organization called ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).  This matter highlights a little-known fact about engineers:  they often handle political matters a good deal better than many politicians do.

I still think the best definition of politics is one I heard from my eighth-grade civics teacher:  "Politics is just the conduct of public affairs."  In the nature of something as widespread and influential as the Internet, in one sense every issue affecting its operation and integrity is political, in that it could potentially affect every user.  But that is not the usual sense in which the word is used.

The facts of the issue are these.  When you type in a URL that uses letters that stand some chance of being understood by a normal human (e. g. www.google.com) the Domain Name System is sort of like a phone book in which network computers look up the URLs that are linked to numbers that computers actually use.  Up until a couple of weeks ago (Oct. 1, to be exact), certain operations pertaining to the assignment of domain names and other more technical matters were performed under the supervision of the U. S. Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), through a contract with the already-existing ICANN, a nonprofit organization based in California.  This tie to the U. S. government was viewed by some as a liability, in that it has led in the past to calls from Russia and China to transfer supervision of ICANN to a United Nations agency called the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).  (You can tell there's engineers involved by the number of alphabet-soup outfits in this piece.)  Partly to counter this, for many years both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations have been moving to cut the last formal ties between the Department of Commerce and ICANN, and finally a date was set:  October 1 of this year.

For reasons known best to themselves, but possibly having to do with businesses which were not happy with how domain-name disputes turned out, the attorneys general of the states of Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Texas filed suit to block the transfer.  But a federal judge denied the request and for two weeks now, ICANN has been running without its former Department of Commerce supervision.  I for one have not noticed any big changes, but it was never the kind of thing that was supposed to lead to the sudden appearance of massive censorship on the Internet in the first place.

While the assigning of Internet domain names and keeping them straight on the "root servers" could conceivably be manipulated for devious or sinister purposes, I am unaware of any major instances of this.  As numerous reports pointed out, Internet censorship of the type that goes on in China or Egypt from time to time is committed by the host governments, not ICANN, and there's nothing ICANN can do about it if a sovereign government chooses to pull their Internet plug.  I won't say that the concerns of Sen. Cruz and company are entirely without merit, but it's one of those things that can't be predicted in advance. 

So far, ICANN, and many other technical matters pertaining to the Internet, seem to have been run in a way that is familiar to many engineers, but little known outside the engineering community.  There is not a single term that describes this process, but the phrases "consensus," "just-in-time governance," and "ad-hoc committees" pertain to it.  It is most prominent in the development of engineering standards, which the Internet vitally depends on.

           

Many times in the course of engineering history a need for a standard has arisen.  Technology gives rise to a new capability—precisely-machined screw threads, or radio transmissions, or computer networks—but it will work in a widespread way only if the parties making and using the technology agree on certain standards so everybody's screws will fit, or everybody's computer can talk to the others without a lot of fuss.  So engineers have learned to form standards committees whose members have in mind both technical knowledge and the interests of private and public entities concerned with the new technology.  These committees are very lean organizations—usually the members' firms or departments pay for their participation, so there is little or nothing in the way of staff, buildings, or tax money involved.  The committee meets as long as it takes to figure out a standard, agrees on it, and then publishes its results and in effect says, "If you want to play this new game, here are the rules."  The committee disbands, often, and life goes on, only better than before because now there's a new standard that engineers can use to implement a new technology.

Because these standards committees work almost entirely out of the public eye, most people don't even know they exist.  But without them, we wouldn't have, well, most of the highly sophisticated technology we have.  Wireless networks depend on standards.  The Internet depends on standards.  Electric power depends on standards (the battle of Westinghouse's AC versus Edison's DC was in large part an issue of standards).  And all these things get done almost invisibly, without much publicity or public expense.

Some political scientists have floated the idea of adopting the engineering-standard style of governance to more public matters, and they may have a point.  As anyone who has attended standards meetings can attest, they are not without controversy.  But by and large, standards organizations and technical outfits such as ICANN operate in this mode successfully and efficiently.  And unless future events prove otherwise, it's likely that the fears of Sen. Cruz and company will turn out to be groundless.

I hope ICANN can keep doing its generally good job without the Department of Commerce looking over its shoulder any more.  Instead of politicians making politics out of what looks to be a smoothly-functioning situation, perhaps we could encourage them to ask how engineers deal with technical matters that have political aspects, and learn something about how to get work done.  But at this point in history, it might be too much to ask.

Sources:  CNET carried two stories to which I referred on the transfer of ICANN to an independent status:  one on Sept. 16 at https://www.cnet.com/news/why-is-us-giving-up-control-of-the-internet-dns-icann-domain-ted-cruz-faq/, and one on Oct. 1 at https://www.cnet.com/news/us-internet-control-ted-cruz-free-speech-russia-china-internet-corporation-assigned-names-numbers/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on ICANN.