IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force)
The open standards body that develops the Internet’s core technical protocols through working groups and the RFC process. Discovered while ingesting eff-web-under-attack-ietf, where it shows up not as a neutral plumber but as a governance venue: a place where rules about AI’s access to web content are being written in protocol language rather than in statute.
As a governance instrument
Most of this spoke tracks governance through law and policy — the eu-ai-act, national strategies, standards a firm certifies against. The IETF is a different lever: technical standards as de-facto regulation. A specification that defines how a crawler must identify itself, or how a site signals “no AI training,” sets the conditions for behavior at Internet scale before any legislature acts — and, per EFF, can later be picked up by law and made binding. Two of its working-group efforts are the subject of that critique: ai-preferences and web-bot-auth.
Connections
- subject of eff-web-under-attack-ietf
- hosts the ai-preferences and web-bot-auth working groups