The “Decoding Internet Governance Stakeholders” series of articles invites the community to ponder what underlies the labels that define our interactions, roughly 20 years after the “Tunis Agenda for the Information Society” called for the “full involvement of governments, business entities, civil society and intergovernmental organizations,” as well as to “make full use of the expertise of the academic, scientific and technical communities.” This series specifically questions whether these labels are as meaningful as they were once purported to be, not aiming to reach conclusions but rather to analyze what each label was intended to stand for and what the current reality of each stakeholder group is.

Overview

The technical community predates formal Internet governance structures, having shaped foundational processes such as the ARPANET-originated Request for Comments (RFC) system, which established collaborative methods for developing Internet standards as a default. This community is broad, and can be roughly categorized into infrastructure providers (ISPs, IXPs, CDNs, backbone providers, data center operators), technical resources maintainers (IANA, RIRs, registries, registrars), standards communities (IETF, IEEE, OASIS, WHATWG) and cybersecurity actors (CERTs, M3AAWG, Cloudflare). Other actors will also eventually present themselves as being part of the technical community due to the focus of their work, particularly universities and researchers. The technical community’s general stated goal is to ensure the rational maintenance, development, and expansion of the network to the benefit of all users.

Origins

The technical community is a good starting point for this series, given its constant presence over the course of the development of the technologies that form the Internet. Based on the existing historical literature (such as Hafner & Lyon, 1996 and Abbate, 1999), from the establishment of the initial networks in the 1970s there was already a more collaborative and horizontal (perhaps proto-multistakeholder) relationship being built. Both the U.S.‘s ARPANET and France’s CYCLADES were government-funded research networks being advanced by academics from technical fields, and interests had to be balanced between this burgeoning technical community and the governments they worked for.

The entry of commercial actors took place more significantly within the context of standards-setting bodies such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the then more relevant to this field International Organization for Standardization (ISO). This allowed representatives from major companies, such as IBM, to bring their interests to the table, seeing as they were key developers of much of the hardware and software used in computation at the time. That introduced a new layer of complexity to discussions, as academic engineers began needing to more actively develop solutions alongside their private sector counterparts (see “Patterns in Network Architecture: A Return to Fundamentals”, Day, 2008).

Notice that, up to this point, Internet (or maybe “network”) governance was comprised essentially of engineers and engineering-adjacent technicians dealing with peers who were positioned within different stakeholders. The involved government actors were essentially technical agencies, rather than politicians. Perhaps the most distinct actors were the telephone companies, which sat in the middle of a triangle in which private, technical, and government interests intersected.

With the march towards the commercialization of the Internet in the 1990s, the broader business community joined in and brought genuinely new interests to the table. Concerns over protocol nuances that might have taken up significant time up to that point had to be deprioritized, refocusing the community’s efforts on how to commercialize and turn the Internet into a global system that could be sustainable and profitable, replacing middle-of-the-road technologies like Bulletin Board Systems (BBS).

Around that general timeframe, the technical community created or rallied around institutions such as the Internet Society (ISOC) and, later, ICANN. This can be seen as a sensible move that provided them with mechanisms to maintain footing with other stakeholders, especially as governments slowly began to notice the relevance of the Internet. The general public also started to become interested in the technology, with NGOs and activists incorporating the network into their actions around the milestone sustainability Earth Summit (ECO92).

The first attempt at establishing a more overarching Internet governance structure was made by ISOC (which housed a significant part of the original technical community members), which got together with two UN bodies, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), to assemble a global body for technical Internet management (see more about this in Mueller, 2002). That attempt was unsuccessful, and eventually, ICANN was created as a compromise under pressure from various stakeholders to centralize the management of policies for names and numbers within a multistakeholder framework.

The early ICANN Bylaws from March 31, 1999 divided the community into Address Supporting Organization (ASO), Domain Name Supporting Organization (DNSO), and Protocol Supporting Organization (PSO). Roughly speaking, out of three organisms, two and a half were related to the technical community. This is due to the constituencies of the DNSO being outlined as: ccTLD registries (technical); gTLD registries (technical); registrars (technical/business hybrids); ISP and connectivity providers (technical); commercial and business entities; non-commercial domain name holders; trademark, other intellectual property and anti-counterfeiting interests’ actors.

Soon, the non-voting Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) was established, and over time, the DNSO was restructured into the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), formalizing broader stakeholder participation. Civil society gained more formal representation through the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) and the Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group (NCSG), while non-domain name industry businesses were bundled into the Commercial Stakeholder Group (CSG).

Analysis

During the overview of who comprises the technical community, one of the most important actors in the operation of the Internet was left absent: hosting providers. To elaborate on this point, it is important to stress that when stakeholders make complaints about ongoing issues to the technical community, the suggested solution often involves reaching out to hosting providers. This, however, may not be a trivial task. Where are they? Unless the company also operates as a major registrar, they are usually not found in standards-setting bodies. On top of that, as I discussed in a previous publication, “hosting providers have varied incentives, are largely self-regulated, and there is no harmonized culture or shared set of norms that they need to adhere to, other than that of their own jurisdictions.”

Cloudflare was mentioned as part of the technical community because it does have some presence in Internet governance, mainly within the W3C. However, where Cloudflare falls in our initial rough grouping of actors is nebulous at best. While its primary role is that of a cybersecurity provider, over 4,300 of the 10,000 most popular websites globally now have their operations intermediated by Cloudflare. As such, network-level interventions by Cloudflare are determinant to whether content can be delivered or not, regardless of the underlying protocols and policies in place. Much is discussed about the role of large content platforms from the private sector, but little is said about a range of intermediary services that are becoming central to the Web’s operation due to factors such as the continuous rise in cyber-attacks and disruptions.

The list goes on. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are also rarely present, even though they evolved into an essential technical component of the network, which enables it to function in the way that is currently expected by users. Cloud service providers work on cloud-related standards in organizations such as the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), but are much less visible in broader Internet standards discussions. Some might argue that these actors are absent from larger technical standards-setting bodies because they handle content, and content is the concern of national rather than global Internet governance, but is that really the case?

Most of the technical actors with significant presence are those that have been involved from the early days of the Internet, rather than the newer ones that compose what the Internet is evolving into. These newer actors prioritize operational success over governance involvement, focusing more on their business models than on policy-making. This limits the community’s capacity to address governance issues comprehensively, creating gaps in the policy-making process and ultimately affecting the ability to establish cohesive strategies for managing the Internet’s evolving challenges.

On top of this absence of key actors, other factors are also of note, such as increasing regulatory demands. For example, pressure originating from the many national and regional data privacy laws has increasingly forced the technical community to engage with complex legal landscapes. ICANN’s longstanding effort to adjust its WHOIS database to comply with GDPR demonstrates the complex balance of maintaining existing structures in the face of evolving regulations, emphasizing how legal and technical considerations have become intertwined.

Technical standards such as 5G/6G and the proposal of New IP (largely advanced by Chinese actors) also highlight how diverse governments are increasingly targeting technical layers of the Internet for regulation. The technical community’s engagement in these discussions is crucial to ensuring that Internet infrastructure remains open and interoperable despite political pressures. However, this engagement places the technical community in a reactive position, where they need to mediate between technical capabilities and political demands, further complicating the notion that they remain solely focused on operational stability.

Moreover, the tension between ICANN’s technical mandate and its involvement in regulation is becoming increasingly evident. While infrastructure provision remains ICANN’s core focus, pressures to mitigate technical DNS Abuse, such as that originating from botnets, blur the lines between technical oversight and content regulation. This challenges the traditional understanding of the scope of ICANN’s action, while at the same time being a natural extension of what it means to maintain the Internet’s stability when threat actors present themselves as ever more disruptive of the network’s expected functioning (Disclaimer: the author of this article had significant involvement in the leadup to the contractual negotiations that now enforce regulation of technical DNS Abuse).

As non-technical stakeholders, including governments and civil society, play increasingly prominent roles in governance discussions, the technical community finds itself needing to share responsibility in areas that were once largely their domain. The UN’s Global Digital Compact (GDC), for example, signals a shift towards a centralization of governance and potentially sidelining the multistakeholder model that traditionally gave the technical community a distinct voice. It came to the point of the Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology floating that the technical community should be bundled with civil society; this elicited a strong response from ICANN’s interim CEO together with ARIN and APNIC, which ended up reducing the GDC’s appetite for that change.

It can be concluded from these considerations that the technical community has not changed its goals, but rather, the system is increasingly demanding changes to their roles. Progressively, political concerns and governments in general have a greater influence on the shape of the Internet, making it difficult to support the idea that, at its core, it is neutral. This does not lessen the role of the technical community, but it certainly puts into question the by-the-book assumptions that are made about this actor.

With thanks to Jaqueline T. Pigatto and Laura G. Pereira, whose tough critiques always help me produce stronger research.