Gee, when did we give away the Internet?

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

> From: Andy Oram <andyo () oreilly com>
> I finally couldn't hold it in any longer, and had to vent my
> annoyance at many organizations at once.
>
>   http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4053
>
> Andy



 Published on <http://www.oreillynet.com/>The O'Reilly Network 
(http://www.oreillynet.com/)
 <http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/wlg//pub/wlg/4053>http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4053


Gee, when did we give away the Internet? (An analysis of news about WSIS)

by <http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/wlg//pub/au/36>Andy Oram
Dec. 10, 2003
URL: 
<http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,61527,00.html>http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,61527,00.html

I've been following the recent news on the <http://www.itu.int/wsis/>World 
Summit on the Information Society, and it's getting really bizarre. The 
Wired article cited above is one example of out of the out-of-this-world 
coverage on the World Summit; I heard a similar spin yesterday on a radio 
show that often shares material with the BBC (but I haven't seen a story 
about WSIS on the BBC Web site yet).

What king or dictator or bureaucrat has signed the document giving power 
over the Internet to one organization or another? Did I miss the ceremony?

One laughable aspect of news reportage is that the founders and leaders of 
ICANN always avowed, with the utmost unction, that they were not trying to 
make policy decisions and were simply tinkering with technical functions on 
the Internet. Of course, there is rarely such a thing as a merely technical 
function, and that truth has been borne out by the effects of ICANN's 
policies on "intellectual property" and on the allocation of domain names 
in general. Perhaps it's good for people to be talking openly of ruling the 
Internet.

But, in whatever ways ICANN has managed to wield its three-pronged fork 
(domain names, addresses, and assigned numbers such as protocols), it has 
never come close to being master of the Internet.

Now that the mainstream media have announced that the Internet is up for 
grabs, they are presenting the debate falsely as a two-sided fight between 
ICANN and the <http://www.itu.int/>International Telecommunications Union 
(ITU). That body that has regulated telecommunications for over a century, 
eventually came under the auspices of the United Nations, and has been 
searching for several years for a way to gain new relevancy in the Internet 
era. (I wrote an <http://www.praxagora.com/andyo/ar/govern_itu.html>article 
on one of their forays some time ago.) It has never gotten anywhere close.

The WSIS meeting has generated the most news coverage of the ITU I've ever 
seen, so it must already be a success for them. If they can bully the U.S. 
government and ICANN enough to wrest some piece of the ICANN treasure from 
its grasp, I suppose they will consider the summit even more of a success.

So what is up for grabs? Certainly the right to define new top-level domain 
names (anybody visited a .museum site lately?) and to hand out to various 
favored organizations the plum of domain name registration (which really 
should be a nearly pure technical function, and has been turned into a 
heavy-weight, politicized activity by the "intellectual property" 
interests). But that's not really very much.

The fears that seem to be circulating around the domain name fight is that 
governments or other organizations will use control over domain names to 
censor the Internet. Ironically, the biggest threat to freedom in the use 
of domain names has been from the private sector, specifically the 
"intellectual property" interests. But the danger is present that 
governments will catch on (China seems to be doing so) and manipulating the 
system to restrict free speech. Still, with search engines becoming more 
popular and more powerful all the time, domain names are not the prime 
prizes they seemed in the late 1990s.

IP addresses are also a potential source of control that Internet users 
should be conscious about, if not worried about. Addressing can be abused 
mainly in a context of scarcity, and there has been debate for years over 
whether IP addresses are getting scarce. (They're certainly scarce when you 
ask the average local ISP for more than one!) A vigorous campaign to adopt 
IPv6 would remove most of the worry over this potential choke-hold.

And who ultimately is in charge of the Domain Name System? You are. You 
determine what domains you view. Somewhere on your personal computer is a 
configuration option that determines where you go to resolve top-level 
domains, and you can go far beyond what ICANN would like you to see. Visit 
the <http://www.open-rsc.org/>Open Root Server Confederation.

Well, I don't really mean to say that the Domain Name System is totally 
open and that nobody has control over it. ICANN is still enthroned. The 
ORSC is mostly a form of protest, not a model for the future. (It doesn't 
solve the problem of name collisions, for instance.)

My point is that the Internet is a subtle ecology that has always rested on 
the cooperation of multiple parties. This cooperation spans a spectrum from 
the individual home user on his PC to the peering agreements between major 
backbone owners. As these peering arrangements and the history of ICANN 
show, systems have evolved historically in a rough, unsystematized way, and 
some participants do not like the terms of cooperation.

For instance, underdeveloped countries complain about the interconnection 
fees they have to pay to more powerful backbone operators in developed 
countries. Expanding interconnection points is a way to bring down costs 
without trying to change the politics of peering, but a review of the 
politics would also be pertinent.

While ICANN has bumbled many tasks and exceeded its authority on others, 
its leaders have a sense of the fragility of the Internet ecology. The ITU, 
in contrast, is tromping all over the grounds just in the process of 
mapping it. I find it amusing that, in their search for a boogie man, they 
have ceded to ICANN far more authority than anyone else has.

(The U.S. government reviews its contract with ICANN every year or two. 
It's generally unhappy with what it sees and gives ICANN a tongue-lashing 
each time. But so far no one in the government has had the guts to propose 
something new. Given the problems of dealing with Internet ecology, I can 
understand their reticence.)

There are so many people who have spent years fighting within and outside 
ICANN to change the policies on domain names, that the view of Internet 
policy as ICANN vs. ITU is truly insulting.

Anyway, it's time for some responsible journalists to untangle the mess 
caused by the current spin.

<http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/wlg//pub/au/36>Andy Oram is an editor at 
O'Reilly & Associates, specializing in books on Linux and programming. Most 
recently, he edited 
<http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/peertopeer/>Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the 
Power of Disruptive Technologies.

oreillynet.com Copyright © 2000 O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.

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