International professional fora: a study of civil society organisation participation in internet governance.

In 2011, Microsoft adopted Mozilla's "Do Not Track" (DNT) open standard software for its Internet Explorer browser. Apple's Safari, Opera and Google's Chrome followed suit. Although highly technical, such standards shape the behaviour of groups across the entire industry. The feature communicates to websites that a user does not wish to be tracked and advertisers are expected to respect this choice on a self-regulatory basis. Default DNT opt-outs stems the amassing of expansive user information by advertising companies without citizen consent. The switch from "opt-out" to "opt-in" has far reaching impact on the ability of the advertising industry to collect and collate data on citizens. DNT was agreed upon in the W3C, a self-regulatory professional standards association based at MIT. Promotion of the standard was led by an alliance of civil society groups lobbying for increased privacy for citizens in internet use. This represents, not an end, but the beginning of a long-raging battle between different actors, user groups and states over data protection and privacy. Although there have been efforts to bypass implementation, particularly by members of the US Digital Advertising Alliance, implementation and self-regulation is being monitored and coordinated by groups representing public interest goals and wider civil society such as the Community Media Forum Europe, Dataneutrality, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the European Digital Rights Initiative, the Open Rights Group, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Free Software Foundation and La Quadrature du Net.

The project researchers are interested in whether recent moves to include such civil society groups 'within' self-regulatory fora addresses historical imbalances in representation i.e. whether these groups able to defend and promote citizen rights. Global activism from civil society groups has long been observed in internet governance, particularly vis-à-vis international organisations such as the World Summit on the Information Society and the ITU. This project will innovate by analysing interaction between civil society groups and industry professionals within self-regulatory fora. Rather than seeing the relationship as solely adversarial, the project examines the move towards active inclusion of civil society groups within policy making at the international level. Key developments in this respect are a commitment to multistakeholder governance by highly technical bodies such as the IETF, ISOC, IAB, W3C, and IEEE in 2012 and the establishment of a Global Internet Policy Observatory (GIPO) by the European Commission in 2013. Does participation of civil society organisations (CSOs) in self-regulatory fora promote public interest goals in internet governance? The project investigates on-going CSO solutions to internet governance with three case studies: privacy (an example outlined above), spectrum use and open source standards. Recent global decisions on spectrum are directly affecting digital terrestrial services, like Freeview, at national levels. The UK and Germany have already proposed to end digital terrestrial television. The third case study examines how CSOs and non-corporate groups and are promoting open source solutions within professional fora to counter corporate goals to protect royalties.

Are corporate goals being balanced by CSO solutions which foster the public interest? Over a period of three years, the project team will lift the lid on internet governance at the international level with detailed insight into a world which, although highly technical, affects the way in which citizens live and work on a daily basis. This will be an invaluable study considering that the internet has a salient role to play in the development of civil society and economic development in the world today but is, at the same time, immensely technical, technocratic and largely inaccessible to the general citizen.

This study is relevant to policy makers at international and national levels, and civil society sector and private sector actors who work within the field of internet governance. The study will assist users in learning how attention is manipulated, entrepreneurship used, and options are selected within self regulatory fora. In particular, it will explore the mechanisms at work in how agendas evolve into the selection of policy solutions, given a certain problem and a political context.

The outcomes of the research will be of particular interest to the professional fora under investigation. It will enable them to gain a richer understanding of their role and significance as standard setters in the global communications environment. These bodies are relatively modestly resourced with demanding workloads. The project will provide them with comprehensible, policy relevant analyses of the ways in which they practice self-regulation and of the public interest implications of that self-regulation. A particularly significant impact of the project will be the facility it will afford these bodies to learn about how self-regulation is organised and practised in sister areas of communications, creating a context for strong social learning and exchange of thinking and best practice in a non-competitive, constructive learning environment.

The project outcomes are also likely to widen the knowledge set of officials with an interest in internet governance. The findings will also exercise indirect, 'second order' influence on the thinking of policy officials through engagement with the self-regulatory bodies under investigation and in exchanges with policy makers during the project. They will impact on other professional fora and regulatory bodies in the broad communications and media environment which employ or are interested in self-regulation in some form. In a similar way to the experts, which are the focus of the project's investigation, these bodies can learn about regulatory practices in related areas of communications, allowing them in the process to reflect on their own ways of working. The project will also be relevant to regulatory bodies outside the communications sector considering the features of self-regulation, which will have access to the briefing papers produced for the project engagement events and published on the project's website, which would be unearthed through a standard web search by parties who are unfamiliar with developments in internet governance but are interested in self-regulation.

The project's findings will have an impact on a range of experts, regulators, corporate business, private and public sector and civil society interests and their representative bodies, in the specific areas of internet governance under investigation in the project. The website, in a 'user friendly' way, will allow users to gain a greater appreciation of the nature, work and broader significance of the regulatory and decision-making bodies in which they participate or to whom they are subject.