Making the Unaccountable Internet: The Changing Meaning of Accounting in the Early ARPANET
A. Feder Cooper, Gili Vidan

TL;DR
This paper examines the evolving concept of accountability in the early Internet's design, challenging essentialist views and highlighting the political and technical shifts that shaped its unaccountable nature.
Contribution
It offers a historical analysis of how accounting was understood in early Internet RFCs, linking technical mechanisms to broader social and political notions of accountability.
Findings
Identifies four conceptualizations of accounting: billing, measurement, management, policy.
Shows how technical and social aspects of accountability are interconnected.
Highlights the political implications of designing accountability mechanisms.
Abstract
Contemporary concerns over the governance of technological systems often run up against narratives about the technical infeasibility of designing mechanisms for accountability. While in recent AI ethics literature these concerns have been deliberated predominantly in relation to ML, other instances in computing history also presented circumstances in which computer scientists needed to un-muddle what it means to design accountable systems. One such compelling narrative can be found in canonical histories of the Internet that highlight how its original designers' commitment to the "End-to-End" architectural principle precluded other features from being implemented, resulting in the fast-growing, generative, but ultimately unaccountable network we have today. This paper offers a critique of such technologically essentialist notions of accountability and the characterization of the…
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