April 13, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ET Anyone who joined a video call during the pandemic probably has a global volunteer organization called the Internet Engineering Task Force to thank for making the technology work. The group, which helped create the technical foundations of the internet, designed the language that allows most video to run smoothly online. It made it possible for someone with a Gmail account to communicate with a friend who uses Yahoo, and for shoppers to safely enter their credit card information on e-commerce sites. Now the organization is tackling an even thornier issue: getting rid of computer engineering terms that evoke racist history, like âmasterâ and âslaveâ and âwhitelistâ and âblacklist.â