Toward Cyber Peace: Managing Cyber Attacks Through Polycentric Governance

The Future of Frontiers

ENUM: The Collision Of Telephony And DNS Policy

The Chinese contribution to global Internet governance debate has been studied mainly by focusing on the governmental perspective. This study was aimed to provide a broader view by analyzing the participation of Chinese academics and civil society in two of the most important Internet governance international organizations: the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Based on historical material and in-depth interviews conducted in Geneva and Beijing, the findings show the evolution of Chinese Internet governance at the global level and suggest the following: first, the Chinese agents in the global debate on Internet governance support a multi-stakeholder perspective; second, although seldom engaged in the decision-making process, the Chinese agents involved in the global governance identify ITU as the more credible international organization in coordinating global governance; third, the Chinese agents have an ambivalent approach to Chinese participation both in ITU and ICANN. Finally, the findings of the study reported in this article contest the understanding that Chinese Internet governance is isolationist in nature.

The Chinese contribution to global Internet governance debate has been studied mainly by focusing on the governmental perspective. This study was aimed to provide a broader view by analyzing the participation of Chinese academics and civil society in two of the most important Internet governance international organizations: the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Based on historical material and in-depth interviews conducted in Geneva and Beijing, the findings show the evolution of Chinese Internet governance at the global level and suggest the following: first, the Chinese agents in the global debate on Internet governance support a multi-stakeholder perspective; second, although seldom engaged in the decision-making process, the Chinese agents involved in the global governance identify ITU as the more credible international organization in coordinating global governance; third, the Chinese agents have an ambivalent approach to Chinese participation both in ITU and ICANN. Finally, the findings of the study reported in this article contest the understanding that Chinese Internet governance is isolationist in nature.

Conference control is an integral part in many-to-many communications that is used to manage and co-ordinate multiple users in conferences. There are different types of conferences which require different types of control. Some of the features of conference control may be user invoked while others are for internal management of a conference. In recent years, ITU (International Telecommunication Union) and IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) have standardized two main models of conferencing, each system providing a set of conference control functionalities that are not easily provided in the other one. This paper analyzes the main activities appropriate for different types of conferences and presents an architecture for conference control called GCCP (Generic Conference Control Protocol). GCCP interworks different types of conferencing and provides a set of conference control functions that can be invoked by users directly. As an example of interworking, interoperation of IETF's SIP and ITU's H.323 call control functions have been examined here. This paper shows that a careful analysis of a conferencing architecture can provide a set of control functions essential for any group communication model that can be extensible if needed.

With the continuing growth of data communications — and especially the Internet and its integration with telecommunications — security matters have become increasingly important. In particular, the development of high-speed packet data communications over air interfaces and their folding into the overall converged networks present an ever increasing set of security issues for major network providers and for enterprise (information technology) environments as well. International and national standards bodies have thus focused on a broad range of subjects applicable to security. Over time, these major standards bodies have become interdependent. In this paper, we address the major efforts of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) through Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC 1) and also the efforts of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). We undertake specifically to explain the interdependence of efforts undertaken by these organizations, whose work defines the direction in the international data and telecommunications security standards in a significant way.

Reviewed by: The History of the International Telecommunication Union: Transnational Techno-Diplomacy from the Telegraph to the Internet ed. by Gabriele Balbi and Andreas Fickers Sarah Nelson (bio) The History of the International Telecommunication Union: Transnational Techno-Diplomacy from the Telegraph to the Internet Edited by Gabriele Balbi and Andreas Fickers. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. Pp. vi + 354. Maintaining global communications networks takes a tremendous amount of work. It requires standardizing telecommunication technologies so that devices at one point in a network—whether a teleprinter, telephone, fax machine, or satellite ground station—can exchange messages with devices at any other point. It also requires a system for sharing the mutually incurred costs of communicating across national borders, using agreed-upon rate structures, set in a common currency. Since the advent of electronic communications in the mid-1800s, an international cohort of technocratic experts has gathered regularly to do this work in one of the oldest and least-studied institutions of global governance: the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). This thirteen-chaptered edited volume, authored by an interdisciplinary set of scholars, is the first academic work to study the ITU from its 1860s founding to the present. Editors Gabriele Balbi and Andreas Fickers hang these essays on the analytical hook of "technodiplomacy," which they use in three senses. First, they contend, the ITU has served as an arena of technodiplomacy, providing an institutional space to debate and build consensus around technological standardization, tariff-setting, and broader regulatory norms. But the ITU is no mere stage. The Union has also been a key actor, intervening directly in disputes over global telecom regulation. Finally, it has served as an antenna by "picking up" emerging conflicts in telecom geopolitics and resolving them through multilateral negotiation (p. 4). As a trinity of technodiplomacy, Balbi and Fickers argue, the ITU cultivated a "community of practice driven by the belief in the power of techno-scientific expertise" (pp. 2–3). The volume offers crucial insights to scholarship on the history of the geopolitics of communications. The authors distinguish three periods in the ITU's 170 years of telecom governance. First, from 1865 to 1947, the ITU developed as a Eurocentric union of industrializing and imperial nation-states, whose regulatory norms presumed public ownership over the telecommunications sector (chs. 1–3, 9). In the second period (1947–2000s), the ITU's Eurocentrism was challenged when it became a specialized agency of the United Nations, and the United States worked to make the organization more receptive to private sector interests. The third period (2000s–present) has been defined by the simultaneous rise of the internet and BRICS states, with the United States insisting that the digital age has rendered the ITU's multilateral governance model obsolete (chs. 5–6, 13). [End Page 578] This temporal frame also reveals the ITU's attempts to manage technological innovation from the mechanical and electronic to the digital era—and how it acted as a crucial producer and gatekeeper of technical knowledge. The authors show that the ITU has managed the polemics of technological standardization, in part, by siloing them within semi-independent "international consultative committees" (CCIs) for telegraphy, wireless radio, and telephony. Dominated by engineers from the world's wealthiest states, CCIs incubated the ITU's most potent operating logic: that technological questions should remain distinct from supposedly "political" or economic questions—and that the ITU's technical cooperation was superior to, and should remain insulated from, "politicized" bodies like the League of Nations or UN. This often muted critical conversations about inequality and communications sovereignty across the developing world, to the deep frustration of poorer and decolonizing states (chs. 4–5, 12). Similarly, the volume offers fascinating insights on the work and thought of engineers-cum-administrators who circulate(d) in and out of the ITU, whose deep connections to military and colonial interests imbued the ITU with a distinctly imperial orientation and a highly mutable conception of "sovereignty" (chs. 1–2, 7, 10). There are some missed opportunities. The theme of technodiplomacy, for example, develops somewhat unevenly, and the language of "arena, actor, and antenna" in some chapters appears forced. Although the authors seek to place the ITU in a transnational...

The cyber security situation is not as bad as most people think it is - it is worse than most people imagine it could be. Indeed the lack of security of the Internet and of the devices connected to it results in serious vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities create risks for infrastructures that increasingly rely on the Internet, including not just communications, but also power generation and distribution, air transport, and, in the near future, road transport. It is easy and relatively inexpensive to access cyberspace and to obtain the means of conducting offensive cyber attacks. Thus it is tempting to develop offensive cyber capabilities and indeed some states are doing so - as published in their national cyber security strategies, and several states have allegedly carried out cyber attacks. At the same time, a state is bound to protect its citizens, including against cyber attacks and cyber warfare. This will become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, if current trends continue unchecked. This article argues that international agreements on improving cyber security, and limiting cyber attacks would appear to be necessary and appropriate measures. Yet key developed countries resist taking legally binding measures of that nature, see in particular the discussions and outcome of the 2012 International Telecommunication Union (ITU) World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). On the contrary, some of these countries practice mass surveillance, which some consider to be a threat to citizens and to the security of states, and which some authors have even considered, figuratively, to be a form of cyber war, even if it is inappropriately justified as a means of combating terrorism. And they resist calls to end mass surveillance. This paper argues that the positions taken by key developed countries could have grave negative consequences in the future, in particular for those very countries. The time has come to take steps to prevent this, which include more discussions and engagement in various forums, including ITU.

Since the members of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) adopted the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the landscape of global climate governance has undergone fundamental changes. Climate change is no longer mainly governed multilaterally in a top-down manner by nation-states but has taken on a much more fluid nature, including experiments initiated by subnational, nonstate, or private actors that emerge at subnational levels and may be scaled up to the top. While some scholars have argued that this decentralization or fragmentation impedes the effectiveness of the global climate regime, others have been more optimistic about the functioning of the newly emerging, multifaceted structure.Among them was Elinor Ostrom, who, in 2009, received the Nobel Prize for her work on the governance of the commons. Ostrom opposed the pessimistic outlook on the future of global climate governance, putting forward the assumption that the existence of a broad range of climate actions from a diverse set of actors at multiple levels—a phenomenon she labeled polycentric governance—could, in fact, be a more effective approach to governing climate change than merely relying on the deeds of nation-states. In various contributions she provided a visionary account of the changing global climate regime and evidenced the importance of already existing nonstate climate action, a development she proposed should be studied from a polycentric perspective (Ostrom 2012).As she passed away shortly after, many of her ideas remained initial assumptions, yet to be empirically tested and theoretically advanced. This turns the theory into an unharvested field, which might be partly responsible for the fascination entwined around it. No contribution has been able to continue the research agenda she envisioned in a systematic way—potentially because climate governance has grown in both scale and size to a dimension that exceeds the analytical capacity of conventional research teams or book projects.Governing Climate Change: Polycentricity in Action sets out to explore the advantages of conceptualizing climate governance as an emerging polycentric system. Guided by an analytical framework, leading experts explore empirical and theoretical aspects of global climate governance in regard to actors and domains of governance, governance processes, and substantive governance challenges. Five core propositions of polycentric theory, which the editors establish in their introductory chapter, structure the chapters.The edited volume takes up many of the loose threads Ostrom left behind, providing a much-needed comprehensive and critical continuation of the research agenda she originally envisioned. The expertise of the contributing authors allows them to gain profound insights into different aspects of polycentric climate governance. Among the outstanding contributions to the volume is the chapter by Karin Bäckstrand, Fariborz Zelli, and Phillip Schleifer, which sheds light on the understudied nexus between polycentric governance and questions of legitimacy and accountability. Analyzing the specific legitimacy and accountability challenges inherent to polycentric systems of governance using the examples of corporate climate action and climate minilateralism, the authors provide an outline for a larger research agenda. They make the case for how a more systematic reflection of such challenges would improve our understanding of barriers to the achievement of effectiveness in polycentric climate governance and provide valid recommendations for weaving findings into the existing architecture of global climate governance in order to improve existing structures.Some chapters, particularly those concerned with the substantive governance challenges in section IV, dive deeply into inquiring about the greater implications of a more or less polycentric governance system, and other parts of the book analyze the degree and origin of polycentricity in the respective domains. While this stocktaking is an intended and necessary exercise, it reaches a certain redundancy at some point. We witness a higher grade of polycentricity in different domains of climate governance, but so what? A few chapters, most notably the multiply authored chapter “Transnational Governance,” tackle this challenge by considering the potentially new or different (power) dynamics that might evolve under a governance architecture in flux between interlinked actors and domains of polycentric governance. Other chapters would have benefited from a more rigid analytical frame to guide individual contributions beyond this descriptive level.Likewise, the conclusion would have profited from a more in-depth and integrated discussion of the findings from the individual chapters. For instance, it would have been interesting to learn what implications the lack of equity has for the legitimacy of polycentric governance and how this affects the effectiveness of climate policies. In short, a more detailed exploration of the interlinkages between the different constituents of polycentric governance would have done justice to both the theory and the excellent contributions in this volume.That said, the editors have made an immense contribution by bringing together the divergent and complex strands of what can be called a polycentric governance system. The volume has established an excellent foundation on which future studies of polycentric governance can build, and the cracks and gaps that appear should prove to be useful harvesting ground for authors who wish to work this vast field of study.

Internet standards permit users to have access to a wide variety of compatible software, to exchange documents, to combine the use of products made by different vendors, and to communicate directly. The Internet standardization process that eventually came to be carried out under the auspices of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been remarkably successful both in achieving a high degree of acceptance by users and in adapting to significant growth in the number of Internet users and changes in the amount and nature of Internet traffic. After a brief discussion of the economics of standards, this chapter describes how this process came into existence and how and why it survived challenges both from an alternative standard that had been developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and from a number of proprietary technologies. Next, it addresses whether the technocratic nature of the IETF standards process can continue to remain largely immune from the increasing commercialization of the Internet. The chapter proceeds with a discussion of the recent controversy between the IETF and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) over the standard for Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS). Finally, it explores a new challenge to the IETF standards process that has arisen because certain governments are seeking to have a larger role in the operation and governance of the Internet.

The purpose of this article is to critique the process of developing formal standards, which are those that have been approved by an official standards-making body. The bodies that impact US computer standards most include the International Standards Organization (ISO), the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Other groups develop important standards that are outside the formal process. These include the Open Software Foundation (OSF), X/Open, and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The main difference between a formal standards organization and the other groups is the legal framework in which the body operates. The formal organizations are often chartered by the government with strict procedures and rules imposed on the standards development process. OSF and X/Open are each directed by a board of directors, whereas the IETF is an independent, self-governing body that develops its own rules and procedures.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Avalanche! With new information doubling every five years (soon to be every two and a half years!), the information security professional may find herself buried in an information avalanche. Where a new security standard in the financial services area could, in the past, safely take three to five years in the making, we now frown when it takes two years. Where we would, historically, rarely work on even two standards in parallel, we now must work on a dozen. Prior to 1986, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) didn't exist. Today, we have thousands of Requests for Comment (RFC) documents, many of which are on the IETF standards track. With the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) accredited standards bodies, with the International Standards Organization (ISO), with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), and other national and international standards bodies, the information security professional faces hundreds of security- or privacy-related standards, guidelines, or regulatory initiatives each year.

The technology we choose to create: Human rights advocacy in the Internet Engineering Task Force

The Design of the Internet's Architecture by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Human Rights

The debate on whether and how the Internet can protect and foster human rights has become a defining issue of our time. This debate often focuses on Internet governance from a regulatory perspective, underestimating the influence and power of the governance of the Internet's architecture. The technical decisions made by Internet Standard Developing Organisations (SDOs) that build and maintain the technical infrastructure of the Internet influences how information flows. They rearrange the shape of the technically mediated public sphere, including which rights it protects and which practices it enables. In this article, we contribute to the debate on SDOs' ethical responsibility to bring their work in line with human rights. We defend three theses. First, SDOs' work is inherently political. Second, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), one of the most influential SDOs, has a moral obligation to ensure its work is coherent with, and fosters, human rights. Third, the IETF should enable the actualisation of human rights through the protocols and standards it designs by implementing a responsibility-by-design approach to engineering. We conclude by presenting some initial recommendations on how to ensure that work carried out by the IETF may enable human rights.