Digital sovereignty and Internet standards: normative implications of public-private relations among Chinese stakeholders in the Internet Engineering Task Force

ABSTRACT

(How) are Chinese actors contributing to increased state influence in Internet standard-making? In its open and private-based dimension, the Internet is possibly the twenty-first century’s epitome of the liberal international order in its global spatial dimension. Therefore, many see deep normative challenges deriving from the rise of powerful, non-liberal actors such as China. In particular, China and Chinese stakeholders are often portrayed as supporters and promoters of a multilateral Internet governance model based on digital sovereignty aimed at completely replacing the existing multistakeholder, private-based model. Academic views on this topic have become less dichotomous throughout the years, especially as China’s position on it has become more nuanced. However, this academic and policy debate is still open. This article analyses Chinese stakeholder actions in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the key venue for Internet standard-making. Through network analysis, this article maps the engagement of Chinese stakeholders in selected working groups of the IETF over time. Through expert interviews, this article interprets the drivers, evolution, and impact of such engagement. This research yields two main findings: first, it shows that the Chinese government does not have full control of its domestic private actors, among which there is both collaboration and conflict. Second, it concludes that Chinese stakeholders have increasingly accepted the existing functioning of IETF standard-making as they grew influential within it.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• Internet standards
• Internet protocol
• Internet Engineering Task Force
• digital sovereignty
• multistakeholder Internet governance

Acknowledgments

I thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of this special issue, Jack Qiu, Peter Yu, and Elisa Oreglia, for their observations and comments on this article. A special mention goes also to Giampiero Giacomello and Francesco Niccolò Moro for their helpful remarks and suggestions raised during past conferences. Furthermore, the computational part of this research has been possible thanks to the help of the Bigbang developers community, in particular Niels ten Oever, Christoph Becker, Nick Doty, and Sebastian Benthall. A special thanks goes also to the participants in the Group Critique organised by the PhD students of the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, whose comments helped me refine my network analysis. Finally, I wish to thank Sonia Lucarelli, Matteo Dian, and George Christou for their supervision and Rosemary Claire Burnham for proof-reading this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In terms of corporate affiliates authoring RFCs.

2 Huawei’s prominence is defined in terms of RFCs (co)authored by its affiliates.

3 Bigbang code retrievable from: https://github.com/datactive/bigbang (Accessed 21 October 2021).

4 Gephi code retrievable from: https://github.com/gephi/gephi (Accessed 21 October 2021).

5 Only one affiliate of China Mobile, and none of China Telecom, sent more than ten emails in the idr mailing list, while no idr-related RFC has been co-authored by affiliates of these two ISPs, for the timespan in question (IETF, 2021b).

6 By ‘influential activities’, it is meant the capacity of an organisation’s affiliates to (co)author a Standards Track RFC and have the standard recognised by the community and implemented (see footnotes 2 and 3). While the voluntary basis of IETF standards often makes such concepts as ‘approval’ or ‘recognition’ relatively blurred, the IETF website retains an ‘Official Internet Protocol Standards’ archive in its RFC Editor (IETF, 2021b).

Additional information

Funding

The author’s work is solely funded by his PhD scholarship at the University of Bologna.

Notes on contributors

Riccardo Nanni

Riccardo Nanni obtained his PhD in Political and Social Science at the University of Bologna, Italy, in June 2022. During his PhD, he researched the influence of Chinese stakeholders in Internet governance. Currently, he works as Assistant Researcher in Data Governance at Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento (Italy).