Cath Corinne, Floridi Luciano
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JS, UK.
Sci Eng Ethics. 2017 Apr;23(2):449-468. doi: 10.1007/s11948-016-9793-y. Epub 2016 Jun 2.
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.
关于互联网能否以及如何保护和促进人权的辩论已成为我们这个时代的一个决定性问题。这场辩论往往从监管角度聚焦于互联网治理，却低估了互联网架构治理的影响力和力量。构建和维护互联网技术基础设施的互联网标准制定组织（SDO）所做出的技术决策会影响信息的流动方式。它们重塑了技术介导的公共领域的形态，包括其保护哪些权利以及促成哪些行为。在本文中，我们为关于SDO使其工作符合人权的道德责任的辩论做出贡献。我们捍卫三个论点。第一，SDO的工作本质上具有政治性。第二，最具影响力的SDO之一互联网工程任务组（IETF）有道义责任确保其工作与人权相一致并促进人权。第三，IETF应通过实施工程设计责任方法，使其设计的协议和标准能够实现人权。我们通过就如何确保IETF开展的工作能够促进人权提出一些初步建议来结束本文。
