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  • From: "Christian Stalberg" <cpsr_rtp AT internet-lab.com>
  • To: <cpsr-rtp AT cpsr.org>
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  • Subject: [internetworkers] Gee, when did we give away the Internet? (An analysis of news about WSIS)
  • Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 05:30:32 -0500

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

Gee, when did we give away the Internet? (An analysis of news about WSIS)
by Andy Oram
Dec. 10, 2003
URL: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,61527,00.html


I've been following the recent news on the 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 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 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 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.

Andy Oram is an editor at O'Reilly & Associates, specializing in books on
Linux and programming. Most recently, he edited Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the
Power of Disruptive Technologies.

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





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