Protocol Politics

by Denardis, Laura

• ISBN13: 9780262042574
• ISBN10: 0262042576
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-09-30
• Publisher: Mit Pr

Summary

The Internet has reached a critical point. The world is running out of Internet addresses. There is a finite supply of approximately 4.3 billion Internet Protocol (IP) addresses-the unique binary numbers required for every exchange of information over the Internet-within the Internet's prevailing technical architecture (IPv4). In the 1990s the Internet standards community identified the potential depletion of these addresses as a crucial design concern and selected a new protocol (IPv6) that would expand the number of Internet addresses exponentially-to 340 undecillion addresses. Despite a decade of predictions about imminent global conversion, IPv6 adoption has barely begun. IPv6 is not backward compatible with IPv4, and the ultimate success of IPv6 depends on a critical mass of IPv6 deployment, even among users who don't need it, or on technical workarounds that could in turn create a new set of concerns. Protocol Politicsexamines what's at stake politically, economically, and technically in the selection and adoption of a new Internet protocol. Laura DeNardis's key insight is that protocols are political. IPv6 serves as a case study for how protocols more generally are intertwined with socioeconomic and political order. IPv6 intersects with provocative topics including Internet civil liberties, U.S. military objectives, globalization, institutional power struggles, and the promise of global democratic freedoms. DeNardis offers recommendations for Internet standards governance based not only on technical concerns but on principles of openness and transparency and examines the global implications of looming Internet address scarcity versus the slow deployment of the new protocol designed to solve this problem. Information Revolution and Global Politics series

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Scarcity and Internet Governance	p. 1
Scarcity	p. 1
Protocols	p. 6
An Internet Governance Framework	p. 13
Organization of Protocol Politics	p. 20
Protocol Selection as Power Selection	p. 25
Protocol Globalization	p. 26
Defining the Global Internet	p. 36
Institutional Crisis	p. 41
Beyond Markets	p. 49
US Corporate Customer Perspective	p. 54
ISO Standard and IETF Standard Compared	p. 59
Announcement of IPv6	p. 65
Themes in Protocol Development	p. 68
Architecting Civil Liberties	p. 71
Values in Protocol Design	p. 72
Privacy Design Choices	p. 77
A Public Relations Issue	p. 84
Architecting Privacy	p. 87
European Union Privacy Concerns	p. 88
Protocols and the Public Interest	p. 90
Openness as a Value in Protocol Design	p. 93
The Politics of Protocol Adoption	p. 97
The Lost Decade and the e-Japan Strategy	p. 98
European Union Internet Strategy	p. 104
IPv6 Momentum in Asia	p. 107
Protocols and Economic Competition	p. 110
Cybersecurity and Distributed Warfare	p. 113
Concerns about US Economic Competitiveness	p. 117
Protocol Hearing on Capitol Hill	p. 120
Protocols as Social Intervention	p. 122
Questioning IPv6 Security	p. 125
Reality Check on IPv6 Deployments	p. 129
Protocol Transition Challenges	p. 131
Transition Prospects	p. 135
The Internet Address Space	p. 139
Internet Resources circa 1969	p. 141
Distributing Limited Resources	p. 143
Initial Internet Address Constraints	p. 147
Address Conservation Strategies	p. 156
Internationalizing Internet Addresses	p. 159
Global Conflict over Internet Resources	p. 166
International Impasse	p. 177
Prospects for a Market Solution	p. 180
Thoughts about the Sufficiency of the IPv6 Address Space	p. 182
Opening Internet Governance	p. 187
Political and Economic Implications of Protocols: A Framework	p. 190
Values in Protocols	p. 208
Conceptions of Openness	p. 210
Best Practices in Internet Standards Governance	p. 217
The Limits of Technical Inevitability	p. 225
List of Abbreviations	p. 231
Technical Appendix	p. 237
Shorthand Notation for IPv4 and IPv6 Addresses	p. 237
Header Frame Formats for IPv4 and IPv6	p. 240
Selected Bibliography	p. 243
Index	p. 253
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