[Bigbang-dev] Clarifying theoretical commitments going into IETF 116

[Niels ten Oever]

Hi Seb,

On a more theoretical note - what I am currently interested in is trying to identify who the actors are that collaborate on particular norms. In WN I have sought to interrogate the underlying norms per governance body. For me two interests flow from there:

- What are contested subnorms per body (and how to identify them, and the actors that propone and oppose them)
- What are contested norms among bodies (for this we would need cross-body analysis)

I would be very interested to see how much overlap there is across bodies and whether there are similar engagement patterns per company. In other words: is there a particular Cisco way of engaging in the IETF, 3GPP, and RIPE ? Or do they shift their approach per body? What can we learn from that, esp irl to Q1!

I think it would be very cool if we could get some kind of cross body comparison going.

Hope this helps!

Best,

Niels

On 25-01-2023 09:39, Sebastian Benthall wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm very pleased to be going to IETF 116 as a public interest technologist!
> I intend to so what everybody does at IETF meetings: ethnography!
> 
> To prepare, I've been reading the seminal _Wired Norms: Inscription, resistance, and subversion_ (WN).
> I'm reading this keeping in mind Priyanka's interest in a project connecting BigBang and Contextual Integrity (CI)-- something I am certainly interested in!
> 
> I thought it might be productive to clarify some theoretical commitments and terminology ahead of time, since CI use the same terms with slightly different meanings and literature sources.
> 
> What both WN and CI have in common is an emphasis on 'norms'.
> 
> In CI, norms are always connected to a social context, and legitimized by the contexts purposes, the ends of agents within the context, and societal purposes. The norms in CI are informational norms, meaning they govern information flows, and especially flows of personal data. CI tends to see the norms as very stable -- part of the context as an institution and imaginary, to use the language of WN -- but the norms sometimes change with the introduction of new technology.
> 
> WN uses a less sui generic sense of 'norm' taken from international relations. In many ways this is a richer sense of norm than CI's, as it comes with a theory of norm conflict, which CI in its current form lacks. But it is also perhaps a vague sense of 'norm'. My understanding is that 'norms'in IR theory typically bind state actors, whereas WN considers standards and protocols as themselves 'norms'. Neither of these are precisely the same as the 'social norms' at work in CI. For example, norms abot the use of the personal data of IETF participants, contextualized to the IETF, would be canonical CI norms.
> 
> Norm conflict theories may be a good way to deal with one area where CI has an acknowledged weakness, which is in its (lack of) understanding of context collapse.
> 
> Just riffing a bit in searching of a research question that might be broadly appealing... whereas WN addresses the norm conflict between norms grounded in the private multistakeholder governance values of openness, innovation, etc. and norms grounded in human rights (perhaps, Californian ideology vs. European values, to be crude about it), I'd hazard a guess and add into the conflicted mix managerialist values (corporate) and authoritarian values (various non-Western entrants into IETF standarization?).
> 
> Of course it is most interesting if these values manifest in different _standards_. But in terms of using BigBang, maybe what we can observe is how different actors from different contexts/institutions _behave_ differently within the purposefully "multi"--i.e. pluralized-- context of the IETF? Do they have different information norms? These are maybe "metanorms" with respect to the standards protocols, drafts, and so on.
> 
> Am I hitting any marks here? What do others have in mind for a research frontier for BigBang?
> 
> Best regards,
> Seb
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Niels ten Oever, PhD
Postdoctoral Researcher - Media Studies Department - University of Amsterdam
Affiliated Faculty - Digital Democracy Institute - Simon Fraser University
Non-Resident Fellow 2022-2023 - Center for Democracy & Technology
Associated Scholar - Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade - Fundação Getúlio Vargas
Research Fellow - Centre for Internet and Human Rights - European University Viadrina

Vice chair - Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet)

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Read my latest article on network ideologies and how 5G reshapes the internet https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308596122001446
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