[Infowarrior] - In cyberspace, a war over names

[Richard Forno]

In cyberspace, a war over names
By: Michelle Quinn
March 12, 2011 07:44 PM EDT

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=1A342EA1-0870-4367-825D-81C9C6408CA4

SAN FRANCISCO — For those who value the free flow of information on the Internet, there’s only one thing more frightening than having the U.S. government control the Web.

That would be having the United Nations in charge instead.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers opens its annual meeting here Monday, and its international board of experts will go about their jobs of mulling whether .love and .gay and .web should be added to existing domains like .com, .net and .biz.

But they’ll carry out that work in the midst of a turf fight among the United States, other governments and free-speech advocates over who should have control of the domain process.

For now, it’s ICANN, a California nonprofit the Clinton administration helped create in the early days of the Internet. But President Barack Obama’s Commerce Department has suggested that countries around the world retain veto power over new domain names. And countries such as China and Libya have suggested that the United Nations take control of the process.

And that has some free-speech proponents alarmed.

“Domain names and numbers are one of the few chokeholds of free speech,” said Susan Crawford, a former special assistant to the Obama administration on science, technology and innovation policy. “By having a government-led institution, it will immediately insert lowest-common-denominator speech demands into the decision-making process.”

Recent events have heightened concerns about government control.

Governments in Egypt and Libya blacked out parts of the Internet during recent protests. Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s seizure of more than 100 domain names of websites accused of copyright infringement has sparked cries of First Amendment violations here at home.

The reason that control of the Internet’s addressing and numbering system is important is that, in the technical workings of cyberspace, you have to have a name and number to exist.

The U.S. government is “ganging up with other governments,” charged Milton Mueller, a professor at Syracuse University who has been involved in ICANN. “The thing that’s concerning is that if ICANN makes some kind of deal, who will be cut out of the process? Will ICANN become a remote, bargaining game between this tiny board and a few powerful governments?”

The irony is that the Internet was developed as part of a Department of Defense project some 40 years ago. In 1998, after Web browsers popularized the new medium, the Clinton administration helped set up

Now, the governance of cyberspace is entering a new age.

“ICANN is embarking on the biggest change in its lifetime,” said Kim Davies, who is responsible for domain names at ICANN. “Both ICANN and governments are grappling with what role they play.”

Some lawmakers want to make sure the decisions don’t fall into the wrong hands.

Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.) spoke to those fears in January when she proposed a House resolution to fight any effort to push control of the Internet to the U.N. “It has become increasingly clear that international governmental organizations, such as the United Nations, have aspirations to become the epicenter of Internet governance,” she said in a statement. “And I’m going to do everything I can to make sure this never happens.”

But others argue that ICANN’s model is out of step with the Internet’s growth and importance. With an estimated 2 billion people online, and more joining every day, running the Internet should be in the hands of an international, democratic body, they say.

“Humanity is looking at this small cabal that clearly works with the U.S. government and wields enormous power over the chief communication network, and they are saying this is not a participatory, democratic structure,” said Sascha Meinrath, director of New America Foundation’s  Open Technology Initiative. “And they are right.”

In a series of meetings next week, ICANN will grapple with some of these issues as it seeks to create new real estate in the virtual world. Under ICANN’s proposal, new domain names could be almost anything — companies such as .cannon or subjects such as .movie, .sex or .gay.
That move has countries and business groups ruffled. Some governments object to .sex or .gay as morally offensive. Companies worry about diluting their brand and having to do battle with new competitors.

The expansion will be the chief topic of ICANN’s weeklong meeting, which includes a public education session, committee meetings and public sound-off forums. Former President Bill Clinton is scheduled to speak Wednesday. The gathering culminates in an open board meeting Friday. The board is expected to address the new domain-name process and the results of its meetings with its government advisory committee.

The board will probably decide on the creation of a new domain name, .xxx., which has been off and on the table since 2004.

For the most part, the U.S. government, through the Department of Commerce, has not had a heavy hand with ICANN. But ICANN walks a delicate line over the perception that the U.S. has a special relationship with ICANN and an inappropriate control over the Internet.

Recently, Commerce officials have sent mixed signals about ICANN’s autonomy, and some observers suggest that the U.S. is pressuring ICANN to be more responsive to government concerns to stop an effort by some governments to break away.

Commerce recently proposed to ICANN’s board that a single government should have veto power over any new domain name application “for any reason.” Members of ICANN’s government advisory committee rejected that proposal.

But the question remains: How responsive should ICANN be to governmental concerns?

In a February speech in Denver, Larry Strickling, an assistant secretary in Commerce, suggested that if ICANN did not give governments a seat at the table, they will block more, undermining the Internet’s entire workings. That “will have impacts on Internet security as well as the free flow of information,” he said.

This pressure has troubled some.

ICANN “wasn’t meant to be a government entity,” said David Johnson, a visiting professor at New York Law School who was involved in helping create the contracts that led to the creation of ICANN. “If the government committee is purporting to set the rules directly, that’s a complete destruction of the original goals and may have a lot of problems with accountability and representative democracy.”

But others say that the U.S. has to walk a fine line in order to keep the Internet open. To do that, ICANN has to give governments a voice and needs to be transparent about its decision making.

“The big picture is that the interest of the U.S. government and ICANN are aligned,” Crawford said. “The model is a good one, and the U.S. is acting as a good steward.”

ICANN appears to be gearing up for some sort of battle. For the first time, one of ICANN's officers applied to be a registered lobbyist.

In his application, ICANN's Jamie Hedlund, vice president of government affairs, stated that among the issues he would work on would be education on "ICANN's private sector-led, bottom-up policy development model" and "preserving and enhancing the security and stability of the Internet's systems of unique identifiers, including the Domain Name System."