Research
Research Overview
In 2008 Pakistan attempted to censure its citizens’ access to YouTube. Routes intended to blackhole requests originating in-country leaked, creating an externality that blocked YouTube access globally. In three hours the transnational network operator community restored the legitimate route, and, subsequently, global access to YouTube. To the casual observer, YouTube-Pakistan is further evidence of a “self-healing” Internet. Among operators, YouTube-Pakistan was just another day ensuring routing system integrity. Although seemingly “organic,” such ad hoc crisis management is firmly rooted in institutionalized norms. These norms are continuously developed and adapted by operators, underneath the hood, based on operational insights into emergent uncertainties, yet apace with Internet growth.
My research explains and evaluates the adaptive, non-state institutions that ensure Internet resource integrity critical to national economies. Ongoing work analyzes the challenges facing coordination and cooperation between conventional state authorities and the Internet’s operational security regimes. My research reframes the technical and operational mechanics of the Internet’s numbering and routing system in terms of established political theory to explain and evaluate political mechanics essential to its function. The good news: adaptive, ad hoc crisis management is prevalent and expeditious. A family of consensus-based credible knowledge assessment processes ensure concomitant norms keep pace with innovation, and the attendant uncertainties, in the infrastructure’s topology. These operational authorities explicitly avoid impinging on states’ public policy making, limiting their scope to the common resources that ensure a network of (largely) private networks continue to cohere into a non-discriminatory Internet. Nonetheless, a path-dependent history of harmonious alignment with public interests does not carry the same assurances as explicit coordination and cooperation with the state on well-defined, shared interests.
The bad news: renewed interest in Internet connectivity and security by state actors imposes political demands historically outside this regime’s scope, raising questions whether this regime’s interests and capabilities are commensurate with emerging threats. My dissertation’s conclusion frames this challenge in terms of legitimacy and political authority. Ongoing work refines that framing to address barriers to developing joint capabilities between state and operational authorities. Early successes offer insights into how political capital can be created from social capital endogenous to this security regime. I build on rapport established during dissertation fieldwork and access through my current leadership roles in this regime to evaluate potential paths to a joint regime complex, built on durable political capital, that can foster the cooperation necessary to effectively manage Internet infrastructure integrity demands in the global political arena.