City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

Protocol politics, the globalization of Internet governance, Laura DeNardis

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

Protocol politics

bibliography

Laura DeNardis

Information revolution and global politics

the globalization of Internet governance

The Internet has reached a critical point. The world is running out of Internet addresses. There is a finite supply of approximately 4.3 billion Internet Protocol (IP) addresses - the unique binary numbers required for every exchange of information over the Internet - within the Internet's prevailing technical architecture (IPv4). In the 1990s the Internet standards community identified the potential depletion of these addresses as a crucial design concern and selected a new protocol (IPv6) that would expand the number of Internet addresses exponentially - to 340 undecillion addresses. Despite a decade of predictions about imminent global conversion, IPv6 adoption has barely begun. IPv6 is not backward compatible with IPv4, and the ultimate success of IPv6 depends on a critical mass of IPv6 deployment, even among users who don't need it, or on technical workarounds that could in turn create a new set of concerns. Protocol Politics examines what's at stake politically, economically, and technically in the selection and adoption of a new Internet protocol. Laura DeNardis's key insight is that protocols are political. IPv6 serves as a case study for how protocols more generally are intertwined with socioeconomic and political order. IPv6 intersects with provocative topics including Internet civil liberties, U.S. military objectives, globalization, institutional power struggles, and the promise of global democratic freedoms. DeNardis offers recommendations for Internet standards Goldsmiths College

1. Scarcity and Internet governance ; Scarcity ; Protocols ; An Internet governance framework ; Organization of protocol politics --- 2. Protocol selection as power selection ; Protocol globalization ; Defining the global Internet ; Institutional crisis ; Beyond markets ; US corporate customer perspective ; ISO standard and IETF standard compared ; Announcement of IPv6 ; Themes in protocol development --- 3. Architecting civil liberties ; Values in protocol design ; Privacy design choices ; A public relations issue ; Architecting privacy ; European Union privacy concerns ; Protocols and the public interest ; Openness as a value in protocol design --- 4. The politics of protocol adoption ; The lost decade and the e-Japan strategy ; European Union Internet strategy ; IPv6 momentum in Asia ; Protocols and economic competition ; Cybersecurity and distributed warfare ; Concerns about US economic competitiveness ; Protocol hearing on Capitol Hill ; Protocols as social intervention ; Questioning IPv6 security ; Reality check on IPv6 deployments ; Protocol transition challenges ; Transition prospects --- 5. The Internet address space : Internet resources circa 1969 ; Distributing limited resources ; Initial Internet address constraints ; Address conservation strategies ; Internationalizing Internet addresses ; Global conflict over Internet resources ; International impasse ; Prospects for a market solution ; Thoughts about the sufficiency of the IPv6 address space --- 6. Opening Internet governance ; Political and economic implications of protocols : a framework ; Values in protocols ; Conceptions of openness ; Best practices in Internet standards governance ; The limits of technical inevitability

Globalization of Internet governance