The struggle for the Net

Telecom Asia, Jan, 2005 by Robert Clark

Just whose Internet is it anyway? The 700 million users worldwide of email, the Web, P2P, VoIP and other applications might be surprised to learn that a fierce battle is underway for "control" of the Internet. It's a battle being fought by weighty "position papers" and "strategic plans" at summit meetings around the globe.

On one side are those who insist that governments have the sovereign right to rule over the farthest corners of cyberspace.

On the other are those who say the Internet has become so popular so quickly because it is not run by governments.

That's the position of the incumbent, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), a California-based non-profit set up by the US Department of Commerce, and whose mandate runs out in 2006.

The challenger is the ITU, the UN club of carriers and governments that has run the world's phone numbering system for 139 years.

The first thing to say about "Internet governance" is that it's a misnomer. There's not a great deal about the Internet that can be "governed" that already isn't. Standards for the underlying infrastructure are set through a combination of bodies such the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF), IEEE, the Internet Society, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the ITU.

The most prominent issues, or the ones consumers care about, such as spam, fraud, phishing, secure transactions, pornography and privacy are tackled by international police forces, comms regulators, legislators and hundreds of private firms and industry associations

When it comes to actual content, such as pornography or the right to freedom of expression, no country--and especially not those such as China, Russia and Iran which are pushing for reform--is willing to concede any of its rights to set rules on content.

ITU Secretary-General Yoshio Utsumi was doubtless aware of this when he urged delegates at a November workshop on Internet governance to interpret the term "in its most narrow context." Instead of weighty issues like spam and privacy, which had been exhaustively debated at earlier sessions of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), "we should focus on the core activity of the management of Internet resources by ICANN, in particular top-level domains, which is where important issues remain unresolved."

The heart of governance

At the heart of the Internet is the Domain Name System (DNS). Depending on who you ask, this either functions like a telephone numbering system as a system of address locators or is a completely unique system of search and identification that has grown up with the Internet.

In any case, when it comes to "Internet governance" it is the DNS and all that goes with it that are the prime subject of governance. This is what ICANN is ultimately responsible for, although the actual management of the DNS and address allocations is carried out by groups such as IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) and the various NICs (such as APNIC in Asia Pacific), as delegated by ICANN.

ICANN was originally an informal system of address governance that grew in the '70s and '80s. As the Web site ICANNwatch.org puts it: "As the paymaster for these [military and other] contractors, the US government became the de facto ruler of the DNS. The Internet's exponential growth placed strains on the somewhat ad hoc system for managing the DNS, and what had been primarily technical issues became political, legal and economic problems that attracted high-level official attention."

This came to a head during the first Clinton Administration when the Internet morphed from hobbyist and academic toy into a mass-market communications network.

ICANN, always intended to be an interim arrangement, was thus born in 1998 in a Memorandum of Understanding with the US Department of Commerce. The MoU has been renewed a number of times since, but the DoC has made it clear that it won't be renewed again.

Thus whoever is granted the mandate from 2006 becomes the permanent ruler of the Internet. The stakes are that big.

With the 2006 deadline on the horizon, the UN has convened the WSIS events, intended to be analogous to the UN summits on the environment and global warming that resulted in the Kyoto Protocol.

Global power politics

While the outcome of the Internet governance reform movement is unclear, there's certainly no danger that the issue won't get caught up in global power politics.

The UN-ITU effort is being driven through the WSIS process. The officials at the first WSIS in Geneva in December 2003 were unable to agree on anything more specific than: "The Internet has evolved into a global facility available to the public and its governance should constitute a core part of the Information Society agenda."

As a result, a 40-member UN Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) has been set up with the aim of giving negotiators at the second summit in Tunis in November this year a starting point. Hence, too, Utsumi's warning to stay on-message.

The maximalists still have plenty to say, however, including Utsumi's own staffer Zhao Haolin, the director of the ITU's Telecommunications Service Bureau. He stressed in a paper presented on November 30 that the WSIS debates touched on national sovereignty, security, privacy, IPR and other issues.