Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines

COMMUNICATION: Everyone Wants to Govern the Internet

Diana Cariboni

Dec 11, Dec 11 2003 (IPS) - When typing in a web address (like www.ipsnews.net) or sending an e-mail, most people probably don’t give much thought to how Internet domain names are assigned.

Domain names are unique identifiers that establish geographic (like .ar for Argentina), or other references (such as .com for commercial activities, .org for non-profit organisations, or .gov for government bodies).

Today, heated debate surrounds the following question: With so many economic and political interests involved in the Internet, what is the best way to guarantee that addresses are assigned fairly?

The web was originally governed by the United States, where it first emerged in late 1969 out of a military security project known as ARPANET.

Military questions remained confined to other networks, and ARPANET was incorporated into the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET). The basic principle was data transmission between distant computers, via telephone lines.

By 1990, the NSFNET had 100,000 servers. The first web page was created in Europe, and the first web browser, Mosaic, emerged in 1993.

By then, the web was no longer an exclusively U.S. phenomenon. At the start, standards were set by small groups of people, and even by single individuals, who formed part of an open Internet culture, in which decisions were reached by consensus. Companies and governments were not yet paying much attention to the Internet.

But as the net grew, larger organisations took over much of the work, although those originally involved tried to keep alive the principles of openness and consensus-based decision-making, as well as the vision of the web as a place for open and free information exchange.

However, corporate organisations had an enormous presence on the Internet, and wanted to be involved in governance of the web.

”We were successful in getting the word out on how great the Internet was,” Alejandro Pisanty, a Mexican expert who sits on the board of directors of the California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), told IPS.

”It was only natural that it would grow. We academics and non-governmental organisations weren’t going to be able to remain on our own in cyberspace for long.”

There are three main bodies that set standards for the World Wide Web.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the web’s smooth operation. It sets basic technical standards, and anyone can participate in its working groups, through e-mail.

But ”In recent times the IETF has been coming under increasing pressure from commercial organisations complaining that its policy of reaching wide consensus makes it too slow,” says a report by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC).

The pressure has also come ”from governments and law enforcement agencies wanting to impose legal obligations on it to incorporate such things as wiretapping facilities and traceability of users into its standards,” the APC adds.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sets standards for the Internet in areas like accessibility, user interface, and architecture. Participation is restricted to member organisations that pay annual fees.

The third major standard-setting body is ICANN, a global non-profit corporation set up to oversee a range of Internet technical management functions currently handled by the U.S. government, or by its contractors and volunteers.

ICANN, which manages the Domain Name System (DNS), is made up of representatives of business, universities, and civil society, as well as technical experts.

It emerged in 1998 out of a U.S. Department of Commerce initiative to transfer responsibility for functions involving the technical management of the Internet from the U.S. government and its contractors to a private-sector, globally representative, non-profit, consensus-based organisation.

The transition was to last eight years, until 2006.

One of the first things ICANN did was to push Network Solutions, Inc. (NSI), the dominant registrar of domain names, to allow more competition. For years, the U.S. firm had enjoyed a monopoly granted by Washington.

Competition was originally opened up to five new companies – America Online, CORE, France Telecom, Melbourne IT, and register.com – and 52 other companies have qualified for ICANN accreditation.

ICANN also instituted mandatory arbitration of trademark claims, which has been criticised by trademark holders and civil society groups. In 2001, it approved seven new top-level domains (TLDs), including .info and .biz, but rejected 35 others, which drew complaints from the losing applicants.

The latest problem arose in September, when Verisign, which operates the .com and .net databases, launched a service that redirected users who mistyped a .com or .net address to its own search engine, on which it sold advertising.

That fooled certain filters designed to weed out Internet junk, or ”spam”, into assuming that some junk e-mail was genuine, and triggered a number of problems. ICANN threatened to sue, and VeriSign suspended the service.

Consensus-based decision-making is not easy when the members of a group represent conflicting interests. But according to ICANNwatch.org, the problem with the domains system is its lack of accountability.

”In addition to avoiding governmental accountability mechanisms, ICANN lacks much of the accountability normally found in corporations and in non-profits,” such as competition and shareholder monitoring, says the watchdog group.

Over the past year, ICANN has come under fire in the preparatory meetings for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), taking place this week in Geneva.

The governments of countries like China, Brazil and South Africa complain that ICANN maintains contractual relationships with the U.S. government; that the United States has excessive influence in the organisation; that it does its business overwhelmingly in English; and that the developing South is not adequately represented on its administrative bodies.

They called for the Internet to be governed by a United Nations agency, or for an inter-governmental institution to be set up for that purpose. But the United States and European Union are opposed to the idea.

In meetings in Geneva last Saturday, the governments taking part in the WSIS agreed to include in the conference’s final draft declaration several paragraphs on the need for participation by companies, scientific researchers, civil society and governments.

They stated that ”policy authority for Internet-related public policy issues is the sovereign right of States,” which also have ”rights and responsibilities for international Internet-related public policy issues”.

The WSIS plan of action asks the U.N. secretary-general to set up a ”working group on Internet governance…to investigate and make proposals for action” by 2005, when the second phase of the WSIS will be held in Tunisia.

”Governance of the Internet is a broad issue that encompasses questions like spam, cybernetic crimes, taxes, privacy issues, and much more,” said Pisanty.

But ”the issue has now been reduced to the coordination of domain name systems and Internet Protocol address space allocation,” which ”is already being handled effectively,” he complained.

According to Pisanty, ”academic and social organisations from the South participate heavily,” even ”beyond the minimum levels set by ICANN to guarantee geographic diversity.”

In addition, ”governments of countries from the South” have been steadily incorporated into ICANN’s governing committee, he added.

Other actors within the Internet community are reluctant to accept the idea of setting up a new inter-governmental body.

The history of the Internet ”is based on a self-managing model” that is ”very difficult to adapt to an inter-governmental body,” and that model ”has been very successful, because we have been able to exercise influence over it,” the executive director of the Latin American and Caribbean IP Address Registry (LACNIC), Raúl Echeberría, commented to IPS.

LACNIC is the non-profit organisation that took over responsibility for managing the region’s own Internet addresses, with the formal establishment of a regional Internet registry. There are similar organisations in Asia, Europe and North America, each of which has representatives in ICANN.

”The transition process of transferring many functions to ICANN is to be completed by 2006, and there is no turning back in the process of separation from Washington,” said Echeberría.

In his view, one of the fundamental changes in the next two years will be the relocation of the 13 strategic root servers – the special network that enables computers connected to the Internet to find each other – most of which are now concentrated in the United States.