Who Will Control the Internet?

Kenneth Neil Cukier

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2005

Summary:  Foreign governments want control of the Internet transferred from an American NGO to an international institution. Washington has responded with a Monroe Doctrine for our times, setting the stage for further controversy.

KENNETH NEIL CUKIER covers technology and regulatory issues for The Economist.

Second, there are Internet Protocol numbers, the up-to-12-digit codes, invisible to users, that every machine on the network needs to have in order to be recognized by other machines. Due to a technical decision made when the network was developing in the late 1970s -- in a world speckled with mainframe computers -- the system was set up to accommodate only around four billion potential Internet Protocol numbers, far fewer than are now necessary. Until the Internet is upgraded, accordingly, Internet Protocol numbers must be allocated sparingly -- and carefully, since accidentally duplicating them creates mayhem for routing Internet traffic.

Third are what are called root servers. Some form of control is needed in the actual machines that make the domain name system work. When users visit Web sites or send e-mail, big computers known as root servers match the domain names with their corresponding Internet Protocol numbers in a matter of milliseconds. The database is the world's most important Rolodex. Yet due to a technical hiccup that occurred when the network was young, there can be only 13 root servers, some of which provide data to mirror sites around the world. As a result, somebody must decide who will operate the root servers and where those operators will be based. Because the system evolved informally, the root servers' administrators are diverse, including NASA, a Dutch nonprofit organization, universities, the U.S. military, and private companies. Today, all told, ten root servers are operated from the United States and one each from Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Tokyo.

Fourth and finally, there are technical standards that must be formally established and coordinated to ensure the Internet's interoperability. They entail more than just the addressing system and involve everything from how routers send traffic to parameters so that video flows smoothly. Ultimately, the standards let the Internet evolve.

If all this sounds outrageously technical, that is because it is. And it is the reason why, even after the Internet had become a mass-market medium, most diplomats and foreign policy experts remained largely unaware of these issues. But although the management of the names, numbers, root servers, and standards that constitute the Internet's infrastructure -- what techies call "Internet governance" -- seems nerdy, it can have an important impact on mainstream policy issues. For instance, countries that place restrictions on the types of domain names that can be used effectively hamper free speech. The personal information of registrants of addresses with generic suffixes such as ".com" and ".net" are made publicly available online, which jeopardizes people's privacy. Telecom operators need access to Internet Protocol numbers to deploy services, making them a major asset for companies and an economic interest of countries. Technical standards can be designed either to foster openness or to permit censorship and surveillance. In short, the Internet, before it is physically constructed from routers and cables, is made up of values. And the domain name system is the central chokepoint where control of the Internet can be exercised.

For most of its history, the Internet has been administered by Woodstock-era American engineers and academics. As a result, the network has embodied the philosophy of that community: a political and economic liberalism led to openness on a technical level. The open infrastructure (with nonproprietary standards that let any network connect to any other, hence the "inter-net") has fostered free expression, low-cost access, and innovation. Its private-sector origins (despite initial federal funding) have made the Internet nonbureaucratic, particularly compared with state-run monopoly telecom carriers. And the fact that the Internet's networks carry streams of data rather than mainly voice calls has kept it outside of the purview of traditional telecom regulators.

To be sure, the Internet's openness begets big headaches: it is difficult to track spammers, and the system is tremendously vulnerable to hacking. But the open network is like the open society -- crime thrives, but so does creativity. We take for granted that the Internet we enjoy today will continue to have these characteristics, but this is hardly certain. It all depends on who controls the domain name system and what priorities they choose to set.

THE TANGLED WEB THEY WOVE

Until 1998, the Internet was overseen almost exclusively by one man: Jon Postel, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California. As a graduate student in the 1960s, he was among the handful of engineers who built the Internet. For the next 30 years, he managed it on behalf of the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency, which funded the Internet's initial development.

Postel made seemingly technical decisions such as who should get to operate a country-code domain. Although it may seem odd that national address suffixes (such as ".uk," for the United Kingdom) were allocated to private individuals rather than government bodies, such was the case. In its early days, the Internet was so new and strange that there was usually no appropriate national organization to hand a suffix to. Besides, governments, and particularly their monopoly telecom carriers, more often hindered communications development than helped it. By the mid-1990s, however, it became clear to the small coterie of officials in the United States and elsewhere who were aware of the matter that the Internet could no longer be administered by a single individual. But who or what would replace him?

After a bitter series of negotiations among the business community, governments, and nongovernmental organizations worldwide, the Clinton administration helped broker a compromise and established ICANN in 1998. Because the United States' hands-off approach had allowed the Internet to flourish, it seemed appropriate that the new organization be based in the private sector. This would make it more responsive, more flexible, and less prone to bureaucratic and political squabbling. The negotiations were so tense that Postel suffered a heart attack as they were ending and never lived to see the birth of the successor organization he was instrumental in creating.