  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 "unaccountable Internet" as an
unintended consequence. It explores the changing meaning of accounting and its
relationship to accountability in a selected corpus of requests for comments
(RFCs) concerning the early Internet's design from the 1970s and 80s. We
characterize four ways of conceptualizing accounting: as billing, as
measurement, as management, and as policy, and demonstrate how an understanding
of accountability was constituted through these shifting meanings. We link
together the administrative and technical mechanisms of accounting for shared
resources in a distributed system and an emerging notion of accountability as a
social, political, and technical category, arguing that the former is
constitutive of the latter. Recovering this history is not only important for
understanding the processes that shaped the Internet, but also serves as a
starting point for unpacking the complicated political choices that are
involved in designing accountability mechanisms for other technological systems
today.
