() Internet Governance

January 18, 2021

For my work on internet governance, I am teaming up with the IN-SIGHT project, led by Stefania Milan from the University of Amsterdam and many others to investigate the global competition for influence over the development of critical Information and Communication Technology (ICT) standards in Standard Development Organizations (SDO). As part of this effort, I am further developing the BigBang software tool. BigBang’s goal is to make the production of digital infrastructures more transparent and accountable. This is done by showing who participated, distinguishes and is left out. This includes personal communication channels, documents and network services of regulatory bodies such as IETF, ICANN, W3C, and 3GPP to name but a few. BigBang makes it possible to analyze relationships, discourses, time series and knowledge networks. It is programmed in Python and belongs to notebooks that make BigBang more accessible for researchers and citizens, even with or without experience in quantitative methods. BigBang is motivated by the fact, that discussions about norms and regulations of the Internet are all too often limited to what is visible: search engines, advertisement, and social media platforms. This, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it, “Infrastructure sets the invisible rules that determine the spaces of our everyday life”, as the social geographer Keller Easterling writes. “Changes in the globalizing world are not written in the language of law and diplomacy, but rather in the language of infrastructure.” Thus this project exists to analyze the conversations and power dynamics that create information infrastructures and thus form the backbone of information societies.

Publications

“Interrogating the standardisation of surveillance in 5G amid US–China competition”
Christoph Becker, Niels ten Oever, Riccardo Nanni
DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2024.2302991

“Infrastructural insecurity: Geopolitics in the standardization of telecommunications networks”
Niels ten Oever and Christoph Becker
DOI: 10.1177/1329878X231225748

“The Standardisation of Lawful Interception Technologies in the 3GPP: Interrogating 5G and Surveillance Amid US-China Competition”
Christoph Becker, Niels ten Oever, Riccardo Nanni
DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.4167105

Funding

This project receives funding from the Prototype Fund.