Interesting People mailing list archives
IP: Should Geeks, Or Governments, Run the Net? Washington Post on ICANN
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 05:58:55 -0500
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23790-2002Mar13.html Should Geeks, Or Governments, Run the Net? By Jonathan Krim Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, March 14, 2002; Page E1 Once again, the people who decide how the Internet is supposed to function are not getting along. The Net is alight with e-flames, and people from all over the world are in Accra, Ghana, this week, arguing with the passion of parents at a Little League game. Sometimes, what these relatively anonymous Internet gurus worry about is impossibly geeky. Things like root servers, protocol parameters and port numbers are critical to making sure we see the right Web pages and get the right e-mail, and we're grateful for these people as long as they don't go into too much detail at parties. But as the Internet has insinuated itself more deeply into global commerce and daily life, more fundamental business and political questions have begun to boil: What are the rules for assigning and naming Web addresses, which enable us to find anything and everything? Who controls, and profits from, granting and registering these addresses? Should there be space reserved for purely public endeavors? And so on. Indeed, these questions are mere proxies for the really big one, the one with incalculable zeroes after the $64: How, if at all, should the Internet be governed? This is such a colossal container of worms that people have basically chosen to avoid tackling it head-on, and you can hardly blame them. But recently, the head of what passes for Internet management tossed out a grenade that blew all the smaller issues out of the way. Internet management needs to go well beyond making the technical trains run on schedule, he said. Let's forget about members of the public having seats at the governing table, he said. Replace them with representatives of world governments, he said. Ka-boom. To appreciate how incendiary this is requires only a short look back. For several years, the people (also known as "the technology community") who work on these issues have been toiling in the virtual lab, operating on the basic premise that the Internet is best left to develop on its own. National governments should be avoided at any cost, corporations should not have too much power and no country (i.e., the United States) should predominate. After dozens of fits and numerous starts, what evolved is a nonprofit entity called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. As with many things Internet, ICANN is an odd bird. It is a corporation in look and feel, with a chief executive, a board of directors and an organizational chart befitting the best of bureaucracies (you can learn more at www.icann.org. Some of its 19 directors are technology legends, such as the chairman of the board, Vinton Cerf, who helped design the communications protocol that enables the Internet to work. Another is a former president of Radcliffe College. There are directors from Japan, South Korea, Ghana and Spain. And five of these directors got their posts in a remarkable way: An electronic vote open to all Internet users worldwide. About 33,000 ballots were cast. At the ICANN helm is a grandfatherly Brit named M. Stuart Lynn, a technologist who spent much of his professional life running the computer systems of U.S. universities. At 63, Lynn stepped out of retirement a year ago and into a world riven by a level of infighting that made academic politics look like an Up With People concert. So Lynn and ICANN have struggled along, assigning domains such as ".kids" and ".museums," signing contracts with registration companies, and doing a lot of arguing. And in the process Lynn has come to believe that ICANN is broken. "The original noble 'experiment' and it was noble to see whether a purely private entity could successfully manage a critical global resource simply will not work," he wrote recently. So Lynn proposed his reforms, and the nicest of his critics accuse him of mongering for power. In the view of the more reasoned opponents, the elected public members provide the checks and balances to ensure that ICANN's mission remains technical. Strategically, perhaps Lynn's ploy on public elections will backfire, although reports from Ghana indicate that the board might end the conference today by letting the public members' terms expire in November and providing no process for replacement. But it's reasonable for Lynn to ask, now, whether the Internet, the most pervasive commercial organism to come along since the telephone needs broader oversight. And if so, by whom? Even technical decisions have real-life implications, about price, about access, about privacy, to name a few. As Stanford University professor Lawrence Lessig frequently reminds us, in the digital age the code writers are also policymakers. There are no fiendish black hats in this dispute, and both sides seem to genuinely want to ensure that the Internet not become the province of special interests. On the Internet all politics might not be local, but one hopes it remains the art of compromise. For archives see: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
Current thread:
- IP: Should Geeks, Or Governments, Run the Net? Washington Post on ICANN Dave Farber (Mar 15)