Internet Protocols and the Human Rights to Freedom of Association and Assembly

Introduction

The current draft continues the work started in “Research into Human Rights Protocol Considerations” by investigating the impact of Internet protocols on a specific set of human rights, namely the right to peaceful assembly and the right to association. Taking into consideration the international human rights framework, the present document seeks to deepen the relationship between these human rights and Internet architecture, protocols, and standards. In that way, we continue the work of the Human Rights Protocol Consideration Research Group, as laid out in its charter, “to expose the relation between protocols and human rights, with a focus on the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly” . This document has seen extensive discussion and review in the IRTF Human Rights Protocol Considerations (HRPC) research group and represents the consensus of that group. It is not an IETF product and is not a standard.

Vocabulary used

Architecture: The design of a structure
Autonomous System (AS): Autonomous Systems are the unit of routing policy in the modern world of exterior routing .
: Within the Internet, an autonomous system (AS) is a collection of connected Internet Protocol (IP) routing prefixes under the control of one or more network operators on behalf of a single administrative entity or domain that presents a common, clearly defined routing policy to the Internet .
: The classic definition of an Autonomous System is a set of routers under a single technical administration, using an interior gateway protocol and common metrics to route packets within the AS and using an exterior gateway protocol to route packets to other ASs .
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP): An inter-Autonomous System routing protocol .
Connectivity: The extent to which a device or network is able to reach other devices or networks to exchange data. The Internet is the tool for providing global connectivity . Different types of connectivity are further specified in . The combination of the end-to-end principle, interoperability, distributed architecture, resilience, reliability and robustness are the enabling factors that result in connectivity to and on the Internet.
Decentralization: Implementation or deployment of standards, protocols or systems without one single point of control.
Distributed system: A system with multiple components that have their behavior co-ordinated via message passing. These components are usually spatially separated and communicate using a network, and may be managed by a single root of trust or authority .
Infrastructure: Underlying basis or structure for a functioning society, organization or community. Because infrastructure is a precondition for other activities it has a procedural, rather than static, nature due to its social and cultural embeddedness . This means that infrastructure is always relational: infrastructure always develops in relation to something or someone .
Internet: The Network of networks, that consists of Autonomous Systems that are connected through the Internet Protocol (IP).
: A persistent socio-technical system over which services are delivered ,
: A techno-social assemblage of devices, users, sensors, networks, routers, governance, administrators, operators and protocols
: An emergent-process-driven thing that is born from the collections of the ASes that happen to be gathered together at any given time. The fact that they tend to interact at any given time means it is an emergent property that happens because they use the protocols defined at IETF.
Right to peaceful assembly: "The right of peaceful assembly protects the non-violent gathering by persons for specific purposes, principally expressive ones. It constitutes an individual right that is exercised collectively. Inherent to the right is thus an associative element."
Right to association: The right of everyone to form and join associations, including trade unions , and not to be compelled to belong to one . It protects individuals in joining or leaving groups, and groups in governing themselves, including by deciding on their own membership . An association is "any groups of individuals or any legal entities brought together in order to collectively act, express, promote, pursue or defend a field of common interests" .

Research question The research question of this document is: what are the protocol development considerations for freedom of assembly and association?

Methodology In this document, we deepen our exploration of human rights and protocols by assessing one specific set of human rights: freedom of association and assembly, abbreviated here as FAA. Our methodology for doing so is the following: first, we provide a brief literature review addressing the philosophical and legal definitions of FAA, how these rights are exercised and interfered with in the digital context, and how they relate to protocols and standards. This literature review is not exhaustive but aims at providing some lines of questioning that could later be used for protocol development. Second, we look at some cases of Internet protocols that are relevant to the sub-questions highlighted in the literature review and analyze how these protocols facilitate or inhibit the right to peaceful assembly and association.

Literature selection We conducted a purposive narrative review rather than a systematic one. We started from key works on freedom of association and assembly in international law and on human rights and Internet infrastructure, and followed their references . We complemented this with targeted searches of the RFC series and the documents of UN human rights bodies, which are primary sources for the technical and legal sides of the question. Candidate works were screened by title and abstract until October 2026. The review does not claim exhaustiveness; it aims to represent the main strands of literature relevant to protocol design.

Case selection The case selection is based on an information-oriented selection logic : cases were chosen for what they reveal about the five questions derived from the literature review. Following Seawright and Gerring , the selection combines typical cases (email, mailing lists, IRC), diverse cases that vary across layers of the stack and in whether they enable or inhibit association (WebRTC, peer-to-peer, the Web), and extreme cases (spam, DDoS) that probe where the right to association and assembly ends. Each case is a protocol, or a family of protocols, that meets three criteria: It speaks to at least one of the questions raised in the literature review. Each section of the analysis opens with the question it addresses, and each question is addressed by at least one case. It is specified in IETF RFCs or W3C Recommendations, or it is widely deployed on the Internet, so that the design choices we discuss can be traced to specifications that protocol developers can read and change. It is either a medium that people use to associate and assemble (email, mailing lists, IRC, WebRTC, peer-to-peer networks, the Web), or a phenomenon that the literature identifies as a contested form of assembly or as an interference with it (spam and DDoS). We favored long-lived protocols with a documented history of use, because they allow us to observe how design choices have played out for groups over time. Some protocols appear in more than one section, because a single protocol can bear on more than one question. Some topics raised in the literature are not treated as cases. already analyzes the DNS and middleboxes, and we do not repeat that analysis here. Network shutdowns, surveillance, and the tools used to resist them are documented in depth elsewhere, including in the survey of censorship techniques in and the treatment of pervasive monitoring in and . These practices affect all uses of the Internet, and their effect on association follows from their effect on connectivity and confidentiality in general; they are less directly in scope for a document about how protocols shape the ways people associate and assemble online. Proprietary social media platforms host much online association today, but even though they could be built on open social web protocols, most currently are not and they do not interoperate or enable data portability. These topics are directions for future research, and we return to them in the conclusions. The cases are therefore not exhaustive, and the conclusions should be read as drawn from these cases rather than as a general account of the Internet.

Literature Review

FAA in law and theory The rights to peaceful assembly and the freedom of association are defined and guaranteed in national law and international treaties; however, in this document we limit ourselves to international treaties. Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association” and that “No one may be compelled to belong to an association”. Article 23 further guarantees that “Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests”. In the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights , article 21 stipulates that “The right of peaceful assembly shall be recognized” and that “No restrictions may be placed on the exercise of this right other than those imposed in conformity with the law and which are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security or public safety, public order (ordre public), the protection of public health or morals or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others” while article 22 states that “Everyone shall have the right to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and join trade unions”. General Comment No. 37 on the right of peaceful assembly by the United Nations Human Rights Committee affirms that the right of peaceful assembly protects non-violent online gatherings: “associated activities that happen online or otherwise rely upon digital services [...] are also protected” . Interference with emerging communications technologies that offer the opportunity to assemble either wholly or partly online or play an integral role in organizing, participating in and monitoring physical gatherings are assumed to impede assemblies which are protected by this right. Moreover, any restriction on the "operation of information dissemination systems" must conform with the tests for restrictions on freedom of expression . Other treaties are sometimes cited as the source and framework for the rights to freedom of association and assembly. An example of this is Article 5 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination which stipulates freedom of peaceful assembly and association should be guaranteed “without discrimination as to race, colour, national or ethnic origin”; Article 15 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child which recognises these rights for children with the restrictions cited above; and Article 21 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities which insists on usable and accessible formats and technologies appropriate for persons with different kinds of disabilities. The freedoms of peaceful assembly and association are also protected under regional human rights treaties: article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, articles 15 and 16 of the American Convention on Human Rights, and articles 10 and 11 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. From a more philosophical perspective, Brownlee and Jenkins distinguish between the concepts of association, assembly and interaction, deviating somewhat from what is established in interpretations of international human rights law. "Interaction" refers to any kind of interpersonal and often incidental engagements in daily life, like encountering strangers on a bus. Interaction is seen as a prerequisite for association. According to Brownlee and Jenkins, "assembly" has a more political connotation and is often used to refer to activists, protesters, or members of a group in a deliberating event. The authors refer to association as more "persistent connections" and distinguish between intimate associations, like friendship, love, or family, and collective association like trade unions or commercial businesses, or “expressive associations” like civil rights organizations or LGBTQIA associations. For Brownlee and Jenkins , the right to association is linked to different relative freedoms: permission (to associate or dissociate), claim-right (to oppose others interfering with our conduct), power (to alter the status of our association), and immunity (from other people interfering in our right). Freedom of association thus refers both to the individual right to join or leave a group and to the collective right to form or dissolve a group. Brownlee and Jenkins further identify three specific associative rights: the right to exit, the right to exclude, and the right to organizational autonomy . Brownlee argues that associative freedom is nonetheless narrower than is usually assumed, constrained by consent, need, harm and respect . Freedoms of association and peaceful assembly, however, are relative and not absolute. The right to exclude is itself limited, for example where exclusion amounts to unjust discrimination . As mentioned above, international human rights law provides the framework for legitimate restrictions on these rights, as well as the right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression and opinion. Restrictions can be imposed by states, but only if this is lawful and proportionate. States must document how these limitations are necessary in the interests of national security or public safety, public order, the protection of public health or morals, or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. Finally, states must also protect participants against possible abuses by non-state actors. Taken together, these instruments protect any collective, gathered either permanently or temporarily for peaceful purposes, online and offline . It is important to underline the property of “freedom” because the right to freedom of association and assembly is voluntary and uncoerced: anyone can join or leave a group of choice, which in turn means one should not be forced to either join, stay or leave. In other words, free association means that, within the limits described above, the association of people itself determines who can be a member. An assembly is an "intentional and temporary gathering of a collective in a private or public space for a specific purpose: demonstrations, indoor meetings, strikes, processions, rallies, or even sits-in" . Hamilton proposes defining an assembly as "an intentional gathering by two or more people (including in private and online/virtual spaces)" . Association has a more formal and established nature and refer to a group of individuals or legal entities brought together in order to collectively act, express, promote, pursue, or defend a field of common interests . Examples include civil society organizations, clubs, cooperatives, non-governmental organizations, religious associations, political parties, trade unions, foundations, and online associations . When talking about the human right of freedom of association and assembly, one should always take into account that "all human rights are indivisible, interrelated, unalienable, universal, and mutually reinforcing" . This means that in the analysis of the impact of a certain variable on freedom of association and assembly one should take other human rights into account too. When devising an approach to mitigate a possible negative influence on this right, one should also always take into account the possible impact this might have on other rights. For example, the following rights are often impacted in conjunction with freedom of association and assembly: the right to political participation, the right to privacy, the right to freedom of expression, and the right to access to information. For instance, when the right to political participation is hampered, this often happens in conjunction with a limitation of the freedom of association and assembly because political participation is often done collectively. When the right to privacy is hampered, the privacy of particular groups is also impacted (so-called ‘group privacy’ ), which potentially has consequences for the right to association and assembly. Where the freedom of expression of a group is hampered, such as in protests or through Internet shutdowns, this both hampers other people’s ability to receive the information of the group and impacts the right to assembly of the people who seek to express themselves as a group . Finally, a restriction of the right to association and assembly is not made legitimate by being set out in national law: it must also meet the requirements of international human rights law described above. This matters because governments learn from one another how to restrict nongovernmental organizations through national law .

Collective action on networks The United Nations Human Rights Council adopted resolutions on the promotion, protection and enjoyment of human rights on the Internet in 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018, affirming and reaffirming "that the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online" . Therefore the digital environment is no exception to application of the right of freedom of association. Various other resolutions and reports have established the online applicability of the freedoms of association and assembly, most recently and authoritatively the Human Rights Committee in General Comment 37 (2020). The questions that remain are how these rights should be conceptualized and implemented in different parts and levels of digital environments. The right to freedom of assembly and association online is the subject of increasing discussions and analysis. Especially since the uprisings of 2011, in which the role of social media was widely debated, there have been increasing and ever more sophisticated attacks by autocratic governments on online communities and other associational activities occurring on the Internet . In 2016, the Council of Europe published the “Report by the Committee of experts on cross-border flow of Internet traffic and Internet freedom on Freedom of assembly and association on the Internet” which noted that while the Internet and communication technologies are not explicitly mentioned in international treaties, these treaties nevertheless apply to “the online environment”. The report argues that the “Internet is the public sphere of the 21st century”, demonstrated by the fact that informal associations can be gathered at scale in a matter of hours on the Internet, and that digital communication tools often serve to facilitate, publicize or otherwise enable associations or assemblies in person, like a protest or demonstration. The report notes, on the other hand, the negative ways in which the Internet can also be used to promote or facilitate terrorism, violence and hate speech, thus insisting on the “extremely important and urgent” need to fight online terrorist activities such as recruitment or mobilization, while at the same time respecting the right to peaceful assembly and association of other users. The report's examples range from network shutdowns during the Arab Spring and the shutdown of mobile phone service by California’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) during protests, to the targeting of social media users who organised the Gezi Park protests in Turkey, mass surveillance, the use of VPNs and the Tor network to ensure anonymity, and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks as civil disobedience. The Internet and social media are enablers of protests, as was seen in the Arab Spring. Some of these protests - like online petitions or campaigns - are similar to offline association and assembly, but other protest forms are inherent to the Internet. Hacking and DDoS are subject to controversy within the Internet community: some finding them legitimate acts of protest, and others not . Online association and assembly have become a common starting point for civic mobilization, and even more so where physical gatherings have been impossible or dangerous . From the Arab Spring to the Gezi Park protests, the Internet has played a crucial role by providing means for the fast dissemination of information otherwise mediated by the press, or even forbidden by the government . According to Hussain and Howard the Internet helped “build solidarity networks and identification of collective identities and goals, extend the range of local coverage to international broadcast networks” and served as a platform for contestation of “the future of civil society and information infrastructure” . Digital networks also change how collective action is organized. Bennett and Segerberg describe a logic of connective action, in which people coordinate by sharing personalized content across digital networks, with less reliance on formal organizations . Tufekci argues that this lets movements scale quickly without developing the capacity to make decisions, negotiate and change tactics, leaving them fragile . For protocol design, what matters is therefore not only whether people can reach one another, but whether their tools help groups deliberate, decide and persist.

Interference with online association The Human Rights Committee considers restrictions of activities of free association online or activities of free association reliant upon digital services, that are also protected under article 21, and stipulates that “States parties must not, for example, block or hinder Internet connectivity in relation to peaceful assemblies. The same applies to geotargeted or technology-specific interference with connectivity or access to content.” Additionally, “States should ensure that the activities of Internet service providers and intermediaries do not unduly restrict assemblies or the privacy of assembly participants.” . In June 2020, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights concluded that technologies can be enablers of the exercise of FAA, but technology is also significantly used to interfere with those rights. Specifically, the report mentions network shutdowns and the use of technology to surveil or crack down on protesters, leading to human rights violations. This includes facial recognition technology, among other ways to violate the privacy of people engaged in an assembly or association. The report makes it explicit that companies play a significant role, by developing, providing or selling the technology, but also by directly causing these violations . Internet shutdowns are among the most visible forms of such interference. Of 931 shutdowns recorded in 74 countries between 2016 and 2021, almost half occurred in the context of protests and political crises; given their indiscriminate impacts, shutdowns very rarely meet the test of proportionality . In Syria, network blackouts coincided with significantly higher levels of state repression . Shutdowns are better understood as a spectrum than as a single technique, varying in frequency, duration, breadth and depth ; their technical means are surveyed in . While the Internet facilitates association, that association in turn leaves many traces that can be used for law enforcement or for repression of political dissent. Even the threat of surveillance can deter association. Siatitsa argues that protest surveillance, from facial recognition to fake mobile towers, should be understood as an infringement not only of privacy and expression but of freedom of assembly, which protects collective action . Research in Uganda and Zimbabwe examines how such surveillance chills behaviour , and the Special Rapporteur has called for chilling effects to be built into human rights analysis of surveillance and for states to protect strong encryption and anonymity . Within the IETF, pervasive monitoring is recognized as an attack .

How groups protect themselves Anonymity and pseudonymity can be useful protection mechanisms for those who’d like to attend online assemblies without facing retribution, though they can also be used to cause harm . Research on protest movements shows how groups combine such protections with collective practices. Protesters in Hong Kong in 2019 organized in small private and large public Telegram groups, adopted pseudonymity, and developed their own ways to achieve forms of forward secrecy and post-compromise security when members were arrested . In the Sudanese revolution, a social media blockade prompted anti-censorship approaches at scale, while a complete blackout crippled activists' work . Security research counts activists among at-risk users, whose circumstances amplify digital-safety risks and harms . Ermoshina and Musiani trace how secure messaging protocols were developed as encryption came to be seen as a precondition for the formation of networked publics . The IETF has since standardized Messaging Layer Security (MLS), which provides end-to-end encrypted group key establishment with forward secrecy and post-compromise security for groups of up to thousands of members : properties the protesters in Hong Kong had to approximate through practice.

Self-governance and membership The rights to exit, to exclude and to organizational autonomy have direct counterparts online: who can join, who can be removed, and who decides. Schneider argues that online communities default to "implicit feudalism", with nearly all-powerful administrators rather than democratic self-governance . On Mastodon, by contrast, servers' codes of conduct function as covenants that users, administrators and developers invoke to revoke or deny membership in the federation . Federation does not by itself ensure decentralization: on Mastodon, 10% of instances host almost half of all users, and three hosting networks almost two thirds ; and notes that federation alone is insufficient to prevent centralization, though standards can still contribute to decentralization.

Rights in protocols and standards The IETF itself, defined as an "open global community" of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers , is an example of an association whose work depends on these freedoms. Discussions, comments and consensus around RFCs are possible because of the collective expression that freedom of association and assembly allow. According to Hafner and Lyon, the very word “protocol” found its way into the language of computer networking based on the need for collective agreement among a group of assembled network users . Research has examined how decisions in such bodies carry political consequences: what is at stake in adopting a protocol such as IPv6 , how civil society has sought to inscribe human rights in Internet infrastructure , and how a widely shared belief among IETF participants that technology is not prescriptive works against addressing human rights in standards . discusses issues of FAA, specifically: The expansion of DNS as an enabler of association for minorities. The document argues that the expansion of the DNS to allow for new generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) can have negative impacts on freedom of association because of restrictive policies by some registries and registrars. On the other hand, gTLDs could also enable communities to build clearly identifiable spaces for association (such as .gay). The impact of Distributed Denial of Service attacks on freedom of association. Whereas DDoS has been used as a tool for protest, in many cases it infringes on the freedom of expression of other parties. Furthermore, often devices (such as IoT devices and routers) are enlisted in such DDoS attacks without the owner's or user's consent. Thus they do not have the possibility to exit this assembly. Therefore the document concluded that the IETF "should try to ensure that their protocols cannot be used for DDoS attacks". The impact of middleboxes on the ability of users to connect to the Internet. Lack of connectivity can significantly impact freedom of assembly and association. In particular, if the user cannot retrieve the reason for their inability to connect, there may not be access to due process to dispute the lack of (secure or private) connectivity, either in general or to a specific service. has since updated the guidelines for human rights considerations in for developers of protocols and architectures. sets out the IAB's view that when the interests of end users conflict with those of other parties, IETF decisions should favor end users. In 2019 a UN Special Rapporteur noted the opportunities and challenges posed by digital networks to the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association . The report recommends that international human rights norms and principles should be used as a framework “that guides digital technology companies’ design, control and governance of digital technologies”. The report states that “technical standards” in particular can affect the freedom of association and assembly, and makes some relevant recommendations, including: "[Undertake] human rights impact assessments which incorporate the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association when developing or modifying their products and services,” “increase the quality of participation in and implementation of existing multi-stakeholder initiatives,” “collaborate with governments and civil society to develop technology that promotes and strengthens human rights,” “support the research and development of appropriate technological solutions to online harassment, disinformation and propaganda, including tools to detect and identify State-linked accounts and bots,” and “adopt monitoring indicators that include specific concerns related to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.” In 2023, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that technical standards can facilitate human rights violations or enable the exercise of human rights, and set out the obligations of states and others that take part in standard-setting .

Specific questions raised from the literature review Here are some questions raised from the literature review that can have implications for protocol design: Should protocols be designed to enable legitimate limitations on association in the interests of “national security or public safety, public order (ordre public), the protection of public health or morals or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others”, as stated in the ICCPR article 21 ? Where in the stack do we care for FAA? Can protocols facilitate agency of membership in associations, assemblies and interactions? What are the features of protocols that enable freedom of association and assembly? Does protocol development sufficiently consider usable and accessible formats and technologies appropriate for all persons, including those with different kinds of abilities? Can a protocol be designed to legitimately exclude someone from an association? The first question follows from the literature on interference and on rights in standards; the second and fifth from the rights to exit and to exclude and research on self-governance; the third from research on collective action and on how groups protect themselves; and the fourth from the accessibility obligations in . In the following sections we attempt to answer these questions with specific examples of standardized protocols in the IETF.

Analysis As the Internet mediates collective action and collaboration, it impacts on freedom of association and assembly. To answer our research question regarding how Internet architecture enables and/or inhibits such human rights, we researched several cases related to protocols that have been either adopted by the IETF, or are widely used on the Internet. Our goal is to determine how they facilitate freedom of assembly and association, or how they inhibit it through their design or implementation. We are aware that some of the following examples go beyond the use of Internet protocols and flow over into the application layer or examples in the offline world whereas the purpose of the current document is to break down the relationship between Internet protocols and the right to freedom of assembly and association. In some cases the line between protocols and applications, implementations, policies and offline realities are blurred and hard - if not impossible - to differentiate. The cases were selected according to the criteria in . Each section below considers one of the questions identified in the literature review and examines the protocols or applications (with some overlaps) that bear on it: Question from the literature review Section and cases Q1: Legitimate limitations on association Got No Peace: spam and DDoS Q2: Agency of membership Holistic Agency: mailing lists Q3: Features that enable FAA Civics in Cyberspace: email, mailing lists, IRC, WebRTC, peer-to-peer networking Q4: Usable and accessible technologies Universal Access: Web accessibility and internationalization Q5: Legitimate exclusion from an association Block Together Now: IRC moderation

Got No Peace: Spam and DDoS

The 2020 report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights described how technology is often used to limit freedom of assembly and association, such as through network shutdowns and the surveillance of groups. Because access to the Internet is crucial not only for freedom of association and assembly, but also for the right to development, and the right to freedom of expression and information , the United Nation Special Rapporteur advises to:

Whereas states have an obligation to protect human rights, there has been an increasing call for non-state actors, such as companies, also to respect human rights . The UN adopted guiding principles on business and human rights and talks within the HRC are ongoing about an international legally binding instrument to regulate the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises. This includes a chain-responsibility of actors: not only that the company’s own processes should not negatively impact human rights, but also that the company should also engage in due diligence processes, such as human rights impact assessments. This includes an assessment of whether the products that are sold, or the services that are provided, can be used to engage in human rights violations, or whether human rights violations occur in any stage of the supply chain of the company. If this is the case, measures should be taken to mitigate this. In the case of dual-use technologies, where technology could be used for legitimate purposes, but could also be used to limit freedom of association or assembly, this obligation might mean that producers or sellers should limit the parties they sell to, or even better, ensure that the illegitimate use of the technology is not technically possible anymore, or made more difficult.

Spam In the 1990s as the Internet became more widely adopted, spam came to be defined as irrelevant or unsolicited messages that were posted many times to multiple news groups or mailing lists . Brunton defines spam more broadly as "the use of information technology infrastructure to exploit existing aggregations of human attention" . Here questions of consent, but also harm, are crucial. In the 2000s a significant part of the technical and policy debate on spam revolved around the fact that certain corporations considered spam to be a form of "commercial speech", thus encompassed by free expression rights . Yet spam can be not only a nuisance, but a threat to systems and users. This leaves us with an interesting case around spam mitigation: spam is currently handled mostly by mail providers on behalf of the user. Many countries are adopting regulatory opt-in regimes for mailing lists and commercial e-mail, with a possibility of serious fines in case of violation. Yet many ask: is spam not the equivalent of the fliers and handbills ever present in our offline world? The big difference between the proliferation of such messages offline and online is the scale. It is not hard for a single person to message a lot of people online, whereas if that person needed to go house by house the impact of their efforts would be much smaller. Conversely, if it were a common practice to expose people to unlimited unwanted messages online, users would be drowned in such messages. This puts a large burden on filtering, and in sifting through many messages, other expressions would be drowned out and would be severely hampered. Allowing unlimited sending of unsolicited messages would be a blow against freedom of speech: when everyone talks, nobody can hear. Whereas one could perhaps consider singular instances in which spam could be proportional, legitimate uses of online campaigning, or online protesting, would be drowned out by other spam. Spam has also been used deliberately for this purpose: during five political events in China, Syria, Russia and Mexico in 2011 and 2012, popular Twitter hashtags were inundated with spam intended to overwhelm the voices of protest . Furthermore, the individual receiving the spam never consented to receiving it. Finally, the widespread usage of spam constitutes an attack on the internet infrastructure in terms of mailservers, bandwidth, and inboxes. This in turn thus hamper the freedom of association and assembly that is happening in and is facilitated through the internet infrastructure. Finally, spam leads to spam filtering by users and mail providers on behalf of the user, this in turn might lead to the blocking of messages that a user would consent to, but that get caught in the filter.

DDoS Distributed Denial of Service attacks are leveled against a server or service by a controller of multiple hosts by overloading the server or service’s bandwidth or resources (volume-based floods) or exploiting protocol behaviours (protocol attacks). DDoS attacks can thus stifle the right to assemble online for organisations whose websites are targeted. At the same time there are comparisons made between DDoS attacks and sit-in protests . However the main distinction is significant: only a small fragment of “participants” (from controllers to compromised device owners) in DDoS attacks are aware or willing . Notably, DDoS attacks are increasingly used to commit crimes such as extortion, which infringe on others’ human rights. Because of the interrelation of technologies, it cannot be said that there is one point in the technical stack where one can locate the characteristics of “peaceful” or “non-peaceful” association visible to protocol developers. In the cases of spam blocking and DDoS mitigation, “peaceful or non-peaceful” is not a meaningful heuristic, or even characteristic, of problematic content. Their commonalities are their volume, and the unrequested nature of participation in DDoS and the receiving of spam. One could say that the 'receivers' of demonstrations did not ask for it either, but in the case of spam the receivers are generally a larger group than one particular target, else the spam could be described as a DDoS attack against one target. This allows us to draw the conclusion that DDoS and spam are not examples of freedom of association or assembly.

Holistic Agency: Mailing Lists and Spam

Mailing lists Since the beginning of the Internet mailing lists have been a key site of assembly and association . In fact, mailing lists were one of the Internet’s first functionalities . In 1971 four years after the invention of email, the first mailing list was created to talk about the idea of using Arpanet for discussion. What had initially propelled the Arpanet project forward as a resource sharing platform was gradually replaced by the idea of a network as a means of bringing people together . More than 45 years later, mailing lists are pervasive and help communities to engage, have discussions, share information, ask questions, and build ties. Even as social media and discussion forums grow, mailing lists continue to be widely used and are still a crucial tool to organise groups and individuals around themes and causes . Mailing lists’ pervasive use are partly explained because they allow for free and low-cost association: people subscribe (join) and unsubscribe (leave) as they please. Another contributor to their widespread use is that email functions on low bandwith connections and across platforms. Mailing lists also allow for association of specific groups on closed lists. This enables agency of membership, a key component of freedom of association and assembly. As we mentioned before, there are interesting implications for freedom of association and assembly when looking at spam mitigation. Here we want to specifically note that if we consider that the rights to assembly and association also mean that "no one may be compelled to belong to an association" , spam infringes both rights if an opt-out mechanism is not provided and people are obliged to receive unwanted information, or be reached by people they do not wish to be in contact with.

Civics in Cyberspace: Messaging, Conferencing, and Networking

Civic participation is often expressed as the freedom to associate and assemble, along with other enabling rights such as freedom of expression and the right to privacy. Former UN Special Rapporteur David Kaye established a strong relationship between technology that allows anonymity and uses encryption with positive effects on freedom of expression . Here we look at messaging, including email, mailing lists and internet relay chat; video conferencing; and peer-to-peer networking protocols to investigate the common features that enable freedom of association and assembly online.

Email Email was one of the first applications of the early Internet that showed what the architecture was really capable of, allowing people to exchange messages much faster and more cheaply than communication networks could do before. This enabled many collaborations among academics and other users of the early network, showcasing the importance of email in the forming of assemblies and associations. Whereas many messaging solutions have been invented since email, it is still widely used because of its distributed architecture, reliability, and ability to function on a wide range of devices and platforms.

Mailing lists Not only are mailing lists a good example of how protocols can facilitate the necessary ingredient of agency in freedom of association, we can see how particular features of mailing lists enable or inhibit freedom of association and assembly. The archival function of mailing lists allows for posterior accountability and analysis. The ubiquity and interoperability of email, and by extension mailing lists, provides a low barrier to entry to an inclusive medium. Association and assembly online can be undermined when right to privacy is at risk. One downside of mailing lists are the privacy and security concerns generally associated with email. End-to-end encryption with OpenPGP and S/MIME can keep email communications authenticated and confidential if properly configured, deployed and used, but users often do not have those protections. And with mailing lists, this protection is not typically possible, because with many lists the final recipients are not known to the sender. There have been experimental solutions to address this issue , but this has not been standardized or widely deployed.

IRC Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is an application layer protocol that enables communication in the form of text through a client/server networking model : a chat service. IRC clients are computer programs that a user can install on their system. These clients communicate with chat servers to transfer messages to other clients. Features of IRC include: federated design, transport encryption, one-to-many routing, creation of topic-based “channels”, and spam or abuse moderation. IRC servers may deploy different policies for the ability of users to create their own channels or ‘rooms’, and for the delegation of ‘operator’-rights in such spaces. Some IRC servers support SSL/TLS connections for security purposes which helps stop the use of packet sniffer programs to obtain the passwords of IRC users and barring an ISP or government from knowing which user I am on IRC, but has little use beyond this scope due to the public nature of IRC channels. TLS connections require both client and server support (that may require the user to install TLS binaries and IRC client specific patches or modules on their computers). Some networks also use TLS for server to server connections, and provide a special channel flag (such as +S) to only allow TLS-connected users on the channel, while disallowing operator identification in clear text, to better utilize the advantages that TLS provides. For the purposes of civic participation and freedom of association and assembly in particular, it is critical that IRC’s federated design allows many interoperable, yet customisable, instances and basic assurance of confidentiality through transport encryption. IRC differs from email in the sense that it allows for real-time interaction, stimulating the sense of conversation. This allows people to organize, develop ideas as well as joint identities. This is strengthened through the federated nature of IRC, which gives users the ability to use and connect through different servers, contributing to freedom of association. We investigate the particular aspect of agency in membership through moderation in the section 'Block Together Now: IRC and Refusals' below.

WebRTC Multi-party video conferencing protocols like WebRTC allow for robust, bandwidth-adaptive, wideband and super-wideband video and audio discussions in groups. This facilitates exchanges over the Internet in a similar manner to IRC, but including the usage of audio and video. WebRTC can be configured as direct peer-to-peer videochat without sending data through a central server. This ability to function without a central server is a strong facilitator of freedom of association and assembly. However, WebRTC comes with many different configuration options, which can leave users open to unexpected privacy leakages:

Even though some multi-party video conferencing tools facilitate freedom of assembly and association, their own configuration might pose concrete risks for those who use them. On the one hand WebRTC is providing resilient channels of communications, but on the other hand it also exposes information about those who are using the tool which might lead to increased surveillance, identification and the consequences that might be derived from that. This was especially concerning because the usage of a VPN did not protect against the exposure of IP addresses . has since addressed this concern: it specifies that by default WebRTC traffic should follow the same route as other web traffic and that only the system's typical public addresses should be visible to the application, in part to protect users who rely on a VPN for anonymity. The risk of surveillance also exists in offline spaces, but may generally be easier to analyze for the user. Security and privacy expectations of the user could be either improved or made explicit. This in turn would result in a more secure and private exercise of the right to freedom of assembly or association.

Peer-to-peer networking Since the ARPANET project, the original idea behind the Internet was conceived as what we would now call a peer-to-peer system . Over time it has increasingly shifted towards a client/server model with “millions of consumer clients communicating with a relatively privileged set of servers” . However, the foundational networking protocol of the modern Internet, the Border Gateway Protocol , still functions like original peer to peer network, with an extensive practice of peering and transit . For an example higher up the stack one could look at the peer-to-peer architecture of BitTorrent . At the organizational level, peer production is one of the most relevant innovations from Internet mediated social practices. According to these networks imply "open collaborative innovation and creation, performed by diverse, decentralized groups organized principally by neither price signals nor organizational hierarchy, harnessing heterogeneous motivations, and governed and managed based on principles other than the residual authority of ownership implemented through contract." In his book The Wealth of Networks, significantly expands on his definition of commons-based peer production. In his view, what distinguishes commons-based production is that it doesn’t rely upon or propagate proprietary knowledge: “The inputs and outputs of the process are shared, freely or conditionally, in an institutional form that leaves them equally available for all to use as they choose at their individual discretion.” To ensure that the knowledge generated is available for free use, commons-based projects are often shared under an open license Peer-to-peer (P2P) is essentially a model of how people interact in real life because “we deal directly with one another whenever we wish to” . Usually if we need something we ask our peers, who in turn refer us to other peers. In this sense, the ideal definition of P2P is that “nodes are able to directly exchange resources and services between themselves without the need for centralized servers” where each participating node typically acts both as a server and as a client . has defined the architecture as peers or nodes that should be able to communicate directly between themselves without passing intermediaries, and that the system should be self-organizing and have decentralized control. With this in mind, the ultimate model of P2P is a completely decentralized system, which is more resistant to speech regulation, immune to single points of failure and has a higher performance and scalability. Nonetheless, in practice some P2P systems are supported by centralized servers and some others have hybrid models where nodes are organized into two layers: the upper tier servers and the lower tier common nodes . Whether for resource sharing or data sharing, P2P systems enable freedom of assembly and association. Not only do they allow for effective dissemination of information, but they also leverage computing resources and diminish the costs for the formation of open collectives at the network level. At the same time, in completely decentralized systems the nodes are autonomous and can join or leave the network as they want. This makes the system unpredictable: a resource might be only sometimes available, and some other resources might be missing or incomplete . Lack of information might in turn make association or assembly more difficult.

Universal Access: The Web

Accessibility The W3C has done significant work to ensure that the Web is accessible to people with diverse physical abilities . For example, the implementation of accessibility standards helps people who have issues with seeing or rendering images to understand what the image depicts. Making the Web more accessible for people with diverse physical abilities enables them to exercise their right to online assembly and association. While there are accessibility standards implemented for the Web, this is less the case for the Internet.

Internationalization The IETF uses English as its primary working language, both in its documentation and in its communication. This is also the case for reference implementations. Yet most of the world’s population does not speak English as a first language. states that "Internationalization is for humans. This means that protocols are not subject to internationalization; text strings are." This implies that protocol developers, as well as people that work with protocols, are not people, or that protocol developers all speak English. As a result, it may be significantly easier for people who have a command of the English language to become a protocol developer. It could also lead to a divergence, with the development of separate protocols that are developed within large language communities that don't use English language or Latin script. This makes it harder for people who seek to shape their own space of association and assembly on the Internet to do so. Communities may therefore be driven to rely on proprietary and non-interoperable services, such as Facebook and Weibo, where use of their own script and language is supported. When Ramsey Nasser developed the Arabic programming language قلب (transliterated Qalb, Qlb and Alb) he called it "engineering performance art" instead of engineering, because he knew that his language would not work. In part this is because historically programming tools used the ASCII character set, which encodes Latin characters and was based on the English language. Though modern tools use Unicode, there persist cultural biases in computer science and engineering down to the level of code. Internationalized email addresses, which can be written in scripts such as Devanagari, Arabic, or Chinese, have been standardized since 2012 , and some large email services now support sending to and receiving from them. Yet by 2025 only 26.8% of the mail servers listed under generic top-level domains accepted such addresses , so there is still a significant failure rate in sending and receiving emails to and from other services. This makes it harder for people who do not speak English and/or don’t use the Latin script to exercise their freedom of association and assembly.

Block Together Now: IRC and Refusals

Previously we spoke about the privacy protecting features of IRC that enable freedom of association and assembly, including transport security. But now we turn to the ability to block users and effectively moderate discussions on IRC as a key feature of the technology that enables agency in membership, a key aspect of freedom of association and assembly. For order to be kept within the IRC network, special classes of users become “operators” and are allowed to perform general maintenance functions on the network: basic network tasks such as disconnecting (temporary or permanently) and reconnecting servers as needed . One of the most controversial powers of operators is the ability to remove a user from the connected network by ‘force’, i.e., operators are able to close the connection between any client and server . Moderation and de-federation can be a tool to uphold freedom of association and assembly, because it allows groups to have control over their own make up. IRC servers may deploy different policies for the ability of users to create their own channels or ‘rooms’, and for the delegation of ‘operator’-rights in such spaces. However, these controls can also seriously hamper the ability of a group to get together. Some argue that the low cost of creating a new group is a protection against this, however, this could lead to a repetition of crises of moderation of membership and speech.

Conclusions: What can we learn from these case studies? Communities, collaboration and joint action lie at the heart of the Internet. Even at a linguistic level, the words "networks" and "associations" are closely related. Both are groups and assemblies of people who depend on "links" and "relationships" . Taking legal definitions given in international human rights law and related normative documents, we can easily conclude that the rights to freedom of assembly and association protect collective activity online. These rights protect gatherings by persons for a specific purpose and groups with a defined aim over time for a variety of peaceful, expressive and non-expressive purposes, if and when participation is voluntary and uncoerced. Given that the Internet itself was originally designed as a medium of communication for machines that share resources with each other as equals , the Internet is now one of the most basic infrastructures for assembly and association. Since Internet protocols and the Internet architecture play a central role in the management, development and use of the Internet, we established the relation between protocols and the right to freedom of assembly and association. After reviewing several cases illustrating FAA considerations inherent in protocols standardized at the IETF, we can conclude that the way in which infrastructure is designed and implemented impacts people's ability to exercise their freedom of assembly and association. This is because different technical designs come with different properties and characteristics. These properties and characteristics on the one hand enable people to assemble and associate, but on the other hand also add limiting, or even potentially endangering, characteristics. More often than not, this depends on the context. A clearly identified group for open communications, where messages are sent in cleartext and where people's persistent identities are visible, can help to facilitate an assembly and build trust, but in other contexts the same configuration could pose a significant danger. Endangering characteristics should be mitigated, or at least clearly communicated to the users of these technologies. It is therefore recommended that the potential impacts of Internet technologies should be assessed, reflecting recommendations of various UN bodies and international norms. Lastly, the increasing shift away from federated and interoperable messaging exchange towards closed platforms with non-interoperable chat and media-sharing functionality have a significant impact on the distributed and open nature of the use of the Internet. Even though these platforms could be built on open social web protocols, most currently are not, and they do not interoperate or enable data portability. Future research could further investigate how the use of social media platforms has enabled individuals to associate in groups, but at the same time rendered those groups unable to change or transcend platforms, therefore leading to sorts of "bounded association" and "forced association" both of which inhibit people from fully exercising their freedom of assembly and association. Future research could also examine more closely how network shutdowns, pervasive surveillance, and the tools used to resist them affect the ability of groups to associate and assemble online, building on existing work such as and .

Acknowledgements Gisela Perez de Acha for co-authoring the first versions of this document Fred Baker and Jefsey for work on Internet definitions. Stephane Bortzmeyer, ICNL, and Lisa Vermeer for several concrete text suggestions that found their way in this document. Mark Perkins and Gurshabad for finding a lot of typos. Nick Doty, Gurshabad Grover, an anonymous reviewer, ICNL, Lisa Vermeer, and Sandra Braman for full reviews. The hrpc mailinglist at large for a very constructive discussion on a hard topic. Efforts put in this document by Niels ten Oever were made possible through funding from the Ford Foundation, the Open Technology Fund, and the Dutch Research Council (NWO) through grant MVI.19.032 as part of the program 'Maatschappelijk Verantwoord Innoveren (MVI)'.

Work Space Current work on this draft is happening at: https://github.com/IRTF-HRPC/draft-association Pull requests and issues are welcome.

Security Considerations As this draft concerns a research document, there are no security considerations.

IANA Considerations This document has no actions for IANA.

Research Group Information The discussion list for the IRTF Human Rights Protocol Considerations Research Group is located at the e-mail address hrpc@ietf.org. Information on the group and information on how to subscribe to the list is at https://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/hrpc Archives of the list can be found at: https://www.irtf.org/mail-archive/web/hrpc/current/index.html