Abstract
This article explores bottom-up grassroots ordering in internet governance, investigating the efforts by a group of civil society actors to inscribe human rights in internet infrastructure, lobbying the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Adopting a Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective, we approach this struggle as a site of contestation, and expose the sociotechnical imaginaries animating policy advocacy. Combining quantitative mailing-list analysis, participant observation and qualitative discourse analysis, the article observes civil society in action as it contributes to shape policy in the realm of institutional and infrastructure design.
Highlights
This article explores bottom-up grassroots ordering in internet governance, investigating the efforts by a group of civil society actors to inscribe human rights in internet infrastructure, lobbying the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
We investigate civil society engagement with the organisation, in particular following the transition of the stewardship over Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from the US Congress to the global multistakeholder community announced in early 2014, and map the distinct articulations of the human rights discourse that emerged in relation to internet infrastructure and the organisation itself
Focusing on the emergence and contestation of new ideas, this article offered a snapshot into the concerted efforts of a group of advocates to wire human rights into the policies and procedures of ICANN, seen as a site ‘for the testing and reaffirmation of political culture’ (Jasanoff, 2004, p. 40)
Summary
Civil society emerged as a significant player in the global internet governance debate at the United Nations’ World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS, 2003-2005), when it was invited to the negotiation table ‘on equal footing’ (Hintz, 2009). Rather than a uniform monolithic entity, civil society is a multifaceted field of action and beliefs where distinct approaches, worldviews and visions of what the internet is and should look like co-exist, not without conflicts These collective visions or imaginaires link ‘intentions and projects as well as utopias and ideologies’ Sociotechnical imaginaries embody a normative, prefigurative dimension They can be seen as ‘a means of relating the local and the present to broader developments and structures of the past or the future’ (Hoffmann, Katzenbach, & Gollatz, 2016). They are at once ‘descriptive of attainable futures and prescriptive of the kinds of futures that ought to be attained’ As the process is ongoing, this article tracks two moments of co-production, namely the emergence of new ideas and the ensuing contestation phase (Jasanoff, 2004)
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