IP: Should Geeks, Or Governments, Run the Net? Washington Post on ICANN

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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.

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