Negotiating Internet Standards: Bargaining Power in Global Technical Diplomacy

Paper suggested for “Panel 1: Futures and Transformations of Global Governance” The private sector's major role in global Internet governance is widely acknowledged, yet the specific ways its influence is exerted are still not well understood. This is especially true in technical standardisation, where corporate actors, along with government representatives and academic experts, constantly negotiate the standards at the core of today’s Internet (Harcourt et al., 2020). As a premier Internet body, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) showcases a model of global standard-setting, grounded in (bottom-up) “multistakeholder” participation, as opposed to the state-based model of the UN International Telecommunication Union (ITU). In the IETF, foundational protocols that enable the operation and interoperability of the Internet (such as the Internet Protocol, IP) are negotiated in multi-year processes by large technological companies, such as Google, Apple and Huawei (DeNardis, 2011). How they exert influence and which sources of power matter most remain under-explored. In this paper, we use a global technical diplomacy approach to fill this gap, bringing in conversation scholarship from Internet governance and international negotiations studies. Our methodology builds on research fieldwork carried out in the IETF between 2022 and 2025, which comprised participant observation and semi-structured interviews with experts. We followed both the online discussions and in-person dynamics, via the observation of working groups meetings and the organisation of sixteen semi-structured interviews with experts at two IETF meetings (IETF 118 and 121). Our study shows the kaleidoscopic nature of negotiations in the IETF, proposing a 5-dimensional framework to analyse the sources of power at work, distinguishing between individual, substantive, processual, organisational and institutional bases. We reflect on the practice of technical diplomacy, exploring who gets represented at the IETF, how companies act as proxies in some circumstances, and the impact of geopolitical divides on corporate coalitions and negotiators. At a time when global technology governance is fragmented and contentious, understanding the mechanisms that sustain cooperative engagement within the IETF offers valuable insights into how standardisation bodies can function as stabilising forces in an increasingly polarised landscape (Alexander et al., 2025; Pohle & Voelsen, 2022). As current international debates between large state groupings indicate fundamental divisions about the future of internet governance (and thus increasingly thwart the prospects for negotiations at the UN level), this research questions whether this configuration is paradoxically creating a window of opportunity for corporate interests to take advantage of the situation to promote their interests. While the IETF has always functioned in parallel to other (multilateral) negotiation venues, the renewed interest of state actors for these arcane technology standardisation processes suggest they may be used to circumvent deadlocks in multilateral settings.