[Infowarrior] - Who Controls the Internet?

[Richard Forno]

Who Controls the Internet?
The United States, for now, and a good thing, too.
by Ariel Rabkin
05/25/2009, Volume 014, Issue 34

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/515zoozk.asp

In order to please our European allies and our Third World critics,  
the Obama administration may be tempted to surrender one particular  
manifestation of American "dominance": central management of key  
aspects of the Internet by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Other  
countries are pushing for more control. Early this year, British  
cabinet member Andy Burnham told the Daily Telegraph that he was  
"planning to negotiate with Barack Obama's incoming American  
administration to draw up new international rules for English language  
websites." It would be a mistake for the administration to go along.  
America's special role in managing the Internet is good for America  
and good for the world.

Internet domain names (such as www.google.com) are managed  
hierarchically. At the top of the hierarchy is an entity called IANA,  
the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, operated on behalf of the  
Commerce Department. The U.S. government therefore has the ultimate  
authority to review or revoke any decision, or even to transfer  
control of IANA to a different operator.

Until now, the management of the Domain Name System has been largely  
apolitical, and most of the disputes that have arisen have been of  
interest only to insiders and the technology industry. IANA has  
concerned itself with fairly narrow questions like "Should we allow  
names ending in .info?" Commercial questions about ownership of names,  
like other property disputes, are settled in national courts.  
Political questions like "Who is the rightful government of Pakistan,  
and therefore the rightful owner of the .pk domain?" are settled by  
the U.S. Department of State.

There are persistent proposals to break the connection between IANA  
and the U.S. government. In these schemes, IANA would be directed by  
some international body, such as the United Nations or the  
International Telecommunication Union, which coordinates international  
phone networks. It is unclear what problem such proposals attempt to  
solve. There have been no serious complaints about American  
stewardship of the Internet, no actual abuses perpetrated by American  
overseers. But were we to abdicate this stewardship, a number of  
difficulties could arise.

Domain names sometimes present political questions. Which side in a  
civil war should control Pakistan's Internet domain? Should  
Israel's .il be suspended as punishment for its being an "Apartheid  
state"? What about Taiwan's .tw if China announces an attempt to  
"reabsorb its wayward province"?

Perhaps most serious, control of Internet names could become a lever  
to impose restrictions on Internet content. Many governments already  
attempt to control speech on the Internet. Some years ago, Yahoo! was  
subject to criminal proceedings in France for allowing Nazi  
memorabilia to be auctioned on its website. Britain, Canada, and  
Australia all have mandatory nationwide blacklists of banned sites,  
managed by nongovernmental regulators with minimal political  
oversight. Such blacklists can have unpredictable consequences:  
Wikipedia was badly degraded to British users for some hours because  
of a poorly designed censorship system targeting child pornography.

If we give control of the Internet naming infrastructure to an  
international organization, we must expect attempts to censor the  
Internet. The Organization of the Islamic Conference will doubtless  
demand the suppression of websites that "insult Islam" or "encourage  
hatred," and a number of European countries may well go along.

Most countries lack our First Amendment tradition, and if we wish to  
protect the free speech rights of Americans online, we should not  
allow Internet domain names to be hostage to foreign standards. Many  
other First World countries already have government-imposed  
restrictions on Internet speech that we would not contemplate here.  
Even if Internet governance were shared only with First World  
democracies, they might urge and ultimately demand that domain  
operators impose restrictions on content.

An international Internet-management organization could offer foreign  
governments a way to impose restrictions without public debate. Rather  
than having a political fight about the matter, governments might  
quietly pressure international regulators to draw up and gradually  
extend "responsible behavior" codes for online speech. This would  
follow a pattern familiar in other global institutions: Governments  
negotiate preferred policies without public participation and then  
present the results as an international consensus, beyond political  
challenge.

American stewardship does not mean the world must put its entire trust  
in U.S. oversight. If the United States started using its privileged  
role in ways that other governments found intolerable, they could  
override this behavior. It would be technically straightforward for  
foreign governments to maintain their own naming infrastructure and to  
instruct Internet service providers to use it. This heavy-handed  
government intervention in network operations, however, would likely  
receive substantial public scrutiny. It probably would not be  
undertaken unless the United States gravely misused its authority over  
the Internet.

This same reluctance would apply to potential American responses to  
censorship or mismanagement by an international organization. The  
United States could, in theory, set up a renegade, uncensored  
Internet. But there would likely be significant public distrust,  
substantial political acrimony, and a great deal of hesitation. We are  
better off keeping the public Internet free and leaving the social and  
technical burdens on governments that want to censor. The present  
system is thus perhaps the best way to prevent the naming system from  
being used to chill online speech worldwide.

American supervision of Internet naming is not a historical  
accident.Much of the world's telecommunications infrastructure was  
developed by national post offices. Our unusual tradition of private  
infrastructure development, including the railroad and telephone  
networks, made America fertile ground for the development of the  
Internet. We expect government not only to settle political questions,  
but also to protect the freedom of private entrepreneurs as much as  
possible. To the extent that the Internet is decentralized and self- 
governing, it is so because Americans expect society to work that way.

It is natural for other countries to resent the privileged role of the  
United States in Internet governance and to demand a greater measure  
of control. But if we believe in free speech, we ought to keep control  
of the Internet away from foreign governments that value it far less  
than we do.

Ariel Rabkin is a Ph.D. student in computer science at the University  
of California, Berkeley.