The future of Internet governance

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting-American Society of International Law, Annual, 2007

The second is the Ambassador's subject, which is that there are a lot of countries out there which, for reasons of pride or policy, are just not comfortable with the United States having a preemptive role. And that is a source of great instability when combined with the third thing, which is that many people in the ICANN structure really like UDI. They want ICANN to be separate because that locks in their victories and takes them out of accountability mechanisms that at least exist theoretically now.

PROFESSOR WU:

What do you mean by UDI?

PROFESSOR FROOMKIN:

Unilateral Declaration of Independence. They want ICANN not to be tied to the regular stewardship of any particular country. They disagree among themselves about what the best alternative is, and the Ambassador deals with this every day, so he can speak to this better than I can.

MS. DYSON:

May I just say one thing more? Something which has always been a check on ICANN is that it is not illegal to run ah alternate DNS. People tried to do that, but they did not succeed in the marketplace. They were mostly crackpots--but not all. You can still do that, and it is still not against the law to create an alternative. So the issue is not so much technology. It is simply: do you have something compelling to offer? I am sure we will see some of those, whether it is a country or a TV network or My Space. It will have its own internal namespace inside. If that thing grows very large, it could get interesting.

PROFESSOR WU:

Why do you think we do not see any serious alternatives?

MS. DYSON:

Because the DNS is actually pretty convenient. The problem is that the open Internet now is getting really scuzzy. I think the first thing you are likely to see is some kind of virtual private network (VPN) or a secure financial network. Certainly the U.S. government has its own black networks behind the Internet either completely behind it or running over it in the dark. There is more and more of that, but you are not seeing it when you are on the DNS, except you might see some black matter somewhere.

PROFESSOR WU:

Coming back to you, Ambassador Gross. There are people out there who say that this is crazy: we have the international global resources, the Internet, the medium of the future, and, lo and behold, there is one country running it for the test of the world. How can it possibly be a lasting system to have the United States essentially running a global resource for the entire world, and what possible legitimacy does the United States have in this area? Why not give the authority to the United Nations? Why not give it to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)?

AMBASSADOR GROSS:

Let me respond to that in a couple of ways. First, there is clearly anxiety, and very understandable anxiety about the role of the U.S. government, with regard to ICANN and other media issues. It is a very legitimate source of anxiety. If I were a government official of another country, I think I too would be very anxious about that. And I think that everyone recognizes the origins and the history and so forth. But one of the things that became very interesting to me is that (and this not was intuitively obvious as when I first started looking at these issues) is that there are, no doubt, large numbers of countries--of which I put many in Europe, virtually all of Africa, and many in Asia--which would say that, unless an international treaty-based organization, like the United Nations, ITU, or something else, is in charge, then there is a serious question about its legitimacy.