Star Monitor: Updates on Standards and Internet Governance

The talk gives an update on the standards and internet governance bodies often called the "I-stars": the W3C, the IETF and its research arm, the ITU, IEEE and ICANN. It opens by contrasting how each organisation works, including membership costs, how open they are to non-members, and how they handle intellectual property and antitrust concerns.

The middle section goes through current work. It covers browser-level global privacy control, a new federated identity working group at the W3C, and the ongoing fight over encryption, including UK online safety powers and EU proposals to scan encrypted messages. It describes IETF efforts on detecting unwanted location trackers and on a digital emblem for protected online assets, and it raises concerns about opt-in net neutrality signalling harming smaller providers. The ITU section looks at satellite internet, a resolution that lets states press for service restrictions on systems such as Starlink, and a proposed human rights focus group. The ICANN section covers registration data access after GDPR and new DNS abuse obligations that could be used to restrict speech.

The talk closes by arguing that censorship deserves more attention in protocol work and that affected communities and human rights framing should be brought into standards bodies. Listeners are pointed to a newsletter, a standards reference site and a book for further reading.