I'm about to go off on the Bush Administration again, but at least this time it's on a subject near to this blog's stated purpose.
Some days I think George W. Bush was imposed on us by our enemies. If there were a Manchurian Candidate, he is doing that candidate's bidding.
Our brave armies have been destroyed in Iraq. Our budget has gone from surplus to unrecoverable deficit, and our currency is heading south. The Gulf Coast lies in ruins while a system of kleptocracy that would make Vladimir Putin blush rules in Washington.
And now the Internet's gone.
What follows is from Milton Mueller of Internet Governance:
The results of WSIS Prepcom 3 demonstrate the failure of US unilateralism. The US is well on its way toward being isolated, having lost the support of the European Union in its attempt to keep ICANN and Internet governance under its own control. Now its rigid, defensive policy has put the Internet itself at risk.
The politics in Geneva were driven by an alliance between the European Union, states critical of ICANN such as Brazil, and authoritarian states such as China, Iran and Pakistan. All agreed to create an "Inter-Governmental Council for global public policy and oversight of Internet governance." Unlike ICANN, this Council would exclude civil society and the private sector from participating in policy making. It would set up a top-down, regulatory relationship between a governmental Council and the people who actually produce and use the Internet. As we have learned from the past two years, most governments have little interest in solving the real problems of the Internet. They prefer to play political games: asserting "national sovereignty" over a global communication medium, censoring inconvenient sources of information, thinking of ways to protect national telecom monopolies from internet-driven competition, grabbing control of country names in the domain name space, excluding Taiwan, and so on.
The US government and ICANN have resisted inter-governmental oversight, contending that intergovernmental supervision can be politically unstable and dangerous to the Internet's autonomy. But the US still seems not to understand how its own insistence on unilateral oversight creates the same instability.
When the US criticizes governmental control, the obvious retort is that there is already one government with extensive oversight powers over ICANN and the core technical functions of the Internet: the USA itself. The US is completely at a loss to explain why it should have that control, to the exclusion of all other governments. Its "but we are different" argument might find a receptive audience among US business interests, but it doesn't fly anywhere else. It's not enough for the US to say, "we are not an authoritarian state like China." For one thing, the US seems an increasingly authoritarian state to many in Europe, what with the Patriot Act and other recent measures forcing everyone entering the country to undergo biometric surveillance. But even if that is not an entirely fair perception, the US cannot claim that it will not use its unilateral power over ICANN * for it already has. In August, the Bush administration responded to political pressure from conservative religious groups by asking ICANN to reconsider the creation of a top level domain for adult content. It was inevitable and entirely predictable that other governments, including erstwhile allies such as the European Union, would want their own piece of that power.
The US could have, and should have, privatized and internationalized its oversight authority when it had a chance. It could have, and should have, insisted on robust, democratic accountability mechanisms for ICANN that would have pre-empted demands for centralized, old- style inter-governmental oversight. It could have, and should have, insisted on negotiating binding international agreements protecting the Internet from arbitrary governmental interference and regulation. But it didn't. And now the debate has devolved to a choice between "US control" versus "UN control." If that is the choice, it is only a matter of time before collective international control wins.
What seems to have been lost in the shuffle is the idea of distributed, cooperative control that involves individuals, technical and academic groups, Internet businesses and limited, lawful interactions with governments. The idea that nation-states should not have the ability to arbitrarily intervene in the Internet's operation whenever they feel like it, but should be bound by clear, negotiated constitutional principles, has been crowded out of the debate.
As the WSIS debate spills into the US media, do not permit the US government to wrap itself up in the flag of Internet freedom. It is reaping what it sowed. Its own special, extra-legal authority over ICANN and the Internet has been the lightning rod for politicization. Its insistence on retaining control, and the spillover from its unilateralism in other areas such as the war in Iraq, has done tremendous damage to its credibility. Now the Internet is paying the price.
Let me repeat something here. All the ITU or any international body need do in order to fork the Internet is to do it. There is no army, and no weapon, which can prevent the creation of new DNS regimes, especially if national governments choose to force ISPs to point to them.
The U.S. is allowing the Internet to be broken up into alternate, regional, and national authorities, replicating the stupidity of the old monopoly telecomm system, and preventing all but the elites of various nations from reaching one another.
As Mueller notes, this did not have to happen. And once it happens, its effect cannot be reversed.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Anonymous on October 4, 2005 07:33 PM writes...
I don't get it...If the US created the internet, and expanded it commercial and informational abilities, why should we be concerned about those who cannot create, cannot equal this achievement, but simply want to control it in order to control their own populations? It seems like an arguement made by the villians in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" - hand it over to the government, they know best.
Permalink to CommentNo - the internet is best left as decentralized as possible. As Ayn Rand's John Galt would say, "hands off!!"
We have diametrically opposed political view, but I take apart a report here: http://jerseynut.blogspot.com/2005/10/eu-to-usa-all-your-internet-belong-to.html
2. Jim Beebe on October 7, 2005 12:50 PM writes...
If you honestly believe that the U.S. is going to give control of the TLDs to the U.N. then I would suggest that you take some lessons in recent history. 'Ain't gonna happen. It the EU and/or other countries choose to create their own TLDs in spite of the U.S. then they are free to do so, but it 'Ain't gonna happen, either, because they have much, much more to lose than we do.
Permalink to CommentThe U.S. concieved, build and has grown the Internet into the most powerful communication tool in history. It is a seed of democracy, and those states that are most opposed to ICANN can not tolerate that. The U.N. has made a disaster of just about every project that they have been involved in. They have no technical experience, they are simply a mob. The Internet can not be managed by mob rule, which is what the UN is proposing.
This is nothing but a distraction. The U.S. won't give up the Internet, and the rest of the world can't afford to split the system, so the whole argument is meaningless.
3. Bennett Hatchett on October 7, 2005 10:25 PM writes...
I don’t get the arguments.
The internet has never been the property of the world.
The internet was made by DARPA. Access to it was given to the privet sector, to acct as a communications medium for the benefits of the companies and population of this country, here and abroad. The government has always retained top level control.
It is not a world network. If you have mistaken it for that, then I am sorry.
It a the communications backbone for the united states. The communications backbone for the USA, just happens to reach all over the world.
No country is forced to use it. But they can connect to it, because we allow them too. We never stated that you can’t build your own network, and that you have to use are network. The use of it by other countries is purely by US sufferance.
And, because of that, it remains a piece of US infrastructure.
If someone is kind enough to let you barrow their car, and you like it. Does that mean that you have the right to claim the car as your own?
If you buy a car from a car manufacturer, and you like it. does that give you the right to dictate the operation of the car factory?
Yes, the oversight was given to ICANN. Same as a lot of pieces of US infrastructure are handed over to a US based non for profit groups, created by the government, to oversee their operation.
A foreign government wanting control of the US internet is like a foreign government wanting control of the department of transportation, coast guard, FAA, NASA, or DOD. It’s absurd. UN controlling ICANN, would be exactly the same as those examples.
There is thousands of privet companies that support the operation of the internet. Just as there is thousands of privet companies that support the DOT. If a company doesn’t like the DOT, then they don’t have to work for them. They can go out and build their own road.
The same as if a networking company doesn’t like the way the DOC and ICANN is running the internet, they don’t have to connect to it. They can build their own internet if they want. Even in the US. There is nothing stopping a company from starting a second, totally unconnected internet from the primary united states one. In fact, there is already a couple independent and overlaying internet like networks in the unites states. There is more than one internet, you know?
The DOC’s action to declare that they will not give permanent control of the DNS’s to ICANN is a direct result of the UN’s declaration to try to take control of the ICANN. If the Chinese government made a declaration that it was wanting a voice in the non for profit org that oversees the golden gate bridge, because of so many Chinese tourist visit it ever year, so it‘s an important object the Chinese government, so it must be directly overlooked by the Chinese. Don’t you think that the DOT, and the rest of the federal government of the US would put a lock down on that, so fast, that your head would spine?
When the UN started threatening ICANN, the DOC saw the possibility of a vital piece of US infrastructure becoming controlled by a hostile forging entity. That is unacceptable by anyone’s standards.
If a forging networking company doesn’t want to use their system to support the US internet, then don’t. Make your own network then.
There is nothing wrong with another country making an internet of their own. They can call it what they want, like “infonet“, and do with it what they want like. Just like the US has.
If they want to put gateways up, so that you can access the US internet from the UK infonet. Then so be it.
If they want to let people access all the other internets of the world, then so be it.
If they want to block people from accessing US, and other internets, then so be it.
If they want to block the US from accessing their internet, then so be it.
Living with multiple separate internets is no big deal. The only deference you will note is you will no longer be able to directly access pages listed on US DNS servers. And since IP address blocks won’t be coordinated, there will be no direct connections, there will not be a seamless network. It will rely on gateways to connect two large uncoordinated internets. Just like the gateways that companies use to connect intranets to the internet.
If they want to have a gateway to the US internet with the UK address of…..
UKNET//:Imperialistic-Islamophobic-Zionist-nazi-pigs.gatway/(US internet address here )
It’s your own choice.
But do not tell us (the US) how to run are communications network!
I am still wondering when the rest of the world declared ownership of a Unites states communications asset?
Permalink to Comment4. Tom on October 8, 2005 08:12 PM writes...
I'm more with you than with your first three contributors. But I am writing from Europe, though I have lived in the USA for several years, so they may discount my perspective. Never mind, here it is.
The critical date for the Internet (for the moment broadly defined, including e-commerce, bloggers, infrastructure and all) was when it definitively broke out of its government/academic/military, N. America/Western European, framework. Precisely when doesn't matter, but sometime between 1990 and 1995 will probably do. When the browser began to replace private networks in major enterprises. When Lotus Notes began to fade as the only really credible solution for multi-nationals, and the technical conditions for the dotcom boom were in place. When access from private homes became readily accessible to non-geeks.
By 1995 the cat was out of the bag: by 2000, even with the end of the boom, the US corporate (and government) investment in web-enabled operations, domestic and international, was irreversible. Nobody consciously willed this, let alone decided to do it: the market ran away with the ball. But all the relevant indirect arguments for encouraging an internationally open Internet (US software and hardware exports, open trade, opening up subversive channels for opposition voices in non-free speech regimes, etc) would have pushed US considerations towards letting it rip.
So perhaps the better question is why this US-rest of the world dispute did not emerge five years ago. A lot of this has to do I suspect with the development of an active internationalist open source community, stimulated by Linux, which objected in particular to the failure of the US government to manage the commercially driven excesses of Microsoft, and an increasing sense that the original ICANN structure was being perverted in practice to minimise the role of the democratically elected board members. The intellectuals behind the Internet were losing confidence in ICANN.
But even so there was no evidence of a major pressure to attack the status quo or identify its weaknesses with the hidden hand of the US Government. The structure worked.
The final straws may have been three, apart from the suspicion that the ICANN structure was being subverted against the lay voices. The first was entirely ICANN's fault, the crassly insensitive approval of the xxx TLD. That it got so far in fact disproves the suggestion that USG was (actively or effectively) pulling the ICANN strings: what was Harriet Miers doing at the time?
The second mistake was the belated, panicky USG/Christian Right over-reaction to xxx. Not because the many governments which shared, from the same or different religious or ethical viewpoints, disagreed with the outcome. But because it blew the fiction (or reality) of ICANN's independence, in a way that could not be politically ignored. Like so much of the recent handling of international affairs, the current US administration's instinct for insensitive, unilateral and aggressive responses made a crisis out of a problem.
The third appears to have been the handling of the US position for and at the recent conference. In real life it is extraordinarily difficult to isolate yourself from the rest of the developed world in a largely technical UN body. To arrive with apparently no room to negotiate, and then throw the toys out of the cot is not good or even professionally competent diplomacy.
I have no idea how this will develop. If there are more negotiations, then the US team needs to get an act together, perhaps in terms of an ICANN governing structure which re-inforces its independence from USG over the technical aspects of the infrastructure, and some new international forum, possibly outside the UN structure, where governments could meet to advise on political aspects. If they do nothing, I think your prediction is spot on, and we may be on the way to a major fragmentation of some of the key infrastructure. But let's not get overexcited: the great firewall of China is alreay a reality. And sorry, the horse bolted thebest part of a decade ago.
Tom
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