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.

ICANN was an experiment, a bottom-up, multi-stakeholder approach toward managing a global resource on a nongovernmental basis. Indeed, in its early days it was often touted as a model for other issues that require the unified action of numerous groups from government, industry, and civil society, such as treating communicable diseases or handling climate change. ICANN's private-sector status, moreover, has helped keep the Internet free from political interference. When in 2002 members of the Federal Communications Commission were asked by their counterparts at China's Ministry of Information Industry why Taiwan had been allocated its own two-letter domain (".tw"), the commissioners could pass the buck to ICANN and breathe a sigh of relief.

Yet from the start, ICANN was plagued by controversy. Critics charged that it lacked transparency, accountability, and legitimacy. Civil-society groups felt it was in the pocket of the domain name registration businesses it was designed to regulate. Businesses felt it was overly governmental. And foreign governments felt powerless before it. As many developing countries woke to the Internet's importance, it struck them as outrageous that the Internet was essentially run by a nonprofit corporation whose 15-person board of directors was accountable to the attorney general of the state of California and under the authority of the U.S. government. Even the U.S. Congress criticized it, hauling the group into tense hearings regularly. Half a decade after it was founded with such optimism, the organization was mockingly referred to in tech-policy circles as "ICANN'T."

All this came to a head in 2003, during the preparatory meetings for the World Summit on the Information Society. Washington had been able to deflect criticism of ICANN in bilateral discussions but proved unable to block the momentum for change at the multilateral level. Telecom-policy officials mildly supportive of ICANN were replaced by senior representatives from foreign ministries, officials less familiar with the details of Internet governance but more experienced in challenging U.S. power. Watching the United States go to war in Iraq despite global opposition, these diplomats saw ICANN as yet another example of American unilateralism. What would prevent Washington, they argued, from one day choosing, say, to knock Iran off the Internet by simply deleting its two-letter moniker, ".ir," from the domain name system? Surely the Internet ought to be managed by the international community rather than a single nation.

Governments worldwide sought to dilute the United States' control by calling for a new arrangement, and in November 2004 UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed a 40-person working group to address questions of Internet governance. Washington had planned to grant ICANN autonomy from its oversight in 2006. But the more other countries clamored for power, the more the United States reconsidered its policy of relinquishing control. Ultimately, it came down to national interest: Washington, with so much at stake in the Internet's continuing to function as it had, decided it was not prepared to risk any changes. So, as the UN working group was preparing to release its report (which, unsurprisingly, favored transferring authority over the Internet to the UN), the U.S. government made a preemptive strike. In the brief Commerce Department statement, Washington announced its decision: the United States would retain its authority over ICANN, period.

THE OPEN NETWORK AND ITS ENEMIES

Power, before it comes from arms or wealth, emanates from ideas. The Internet has emerged as a piece of critical information infrastructure for every nation. Developed countries increasingly rely on it for their economic livelihood and basic communications; developing nations recognize it as a way of linking people together, enabling commercial relationships, and generating the transparency and civic dialogue that undergird democratic governance. Information technology can also strengthen the hand of authoritarian regimes, but there seems little doubt that in its current form the Internet's general influence is progressive rather than regressive.

ICANN cannot take credit for any of this, but the group's work has ensured that the network operates smoothly so that these benefits can be realized. As the overseer of the domain name system, the United States has taken a liberal approach in keeping with its liberal values. There is no guarantee that an intergovernmental system would continue on such a course, and so even committed internationalists ought to be wary of changing how the system is run.

This is especially so since the very countries that most restrict the Internet within their borders are the ones calling loudest for greater control. As other countries sharpen their diplomatic knives for the final round of the summit in Tunis in November, the dispute is echoing an earlier battle at Unesco in the 1980s over the so-called New World Information and Communication Order, which led the United States and the United Kingdom to pull out of the organization. Then, it was the Soviet Union, its satellites, and the developing world that called for controlling media activities and funding the development of media resources in developing countries; today, some of those same nations seek power over the Internet, as well as financial aid to overcome the digital divide.

Washington's new position shrewdly mixes a few carrots in along with the big stick. It formally acknowledges that countries have "sovereignty concerns" about their national two-letter address domains -- a mealy-mouthed nod toward granting countries control over them, which is only appropriate. Although this will invite problems, such as with Taiwan's ".tw," these can be sidestepped -- just as the allocation of telephone "country codes" to territories does not confer diplomatic recognition, neither does the allocation of country domains need to. Washington also supports the continued discussion of broader Internet governance issues in multiple forums, which could restrain the creation of a cumbersome and monolithic Global Internet Policy Council (which was among the UN working group's proposals). It may also keep politicians from trespassing on ICANN's more purely technical areas, which could harm the network.

Nevertheless, although the new U.S. position may be the least bad alternative in the short term, it will almost certainly be unsustainable over the longer term. For the moment, there is little other governments can do to rebel. Unless they feel their concerns are being addressed, however, they are likely to try to set up a parallel naming and addressing system to compete with ICANN-sanctioned domains. Technology abhors homogeneity; differing technical standards are the norm rather than the exception. The ongoing scuffle over the creation of Galileo, Europe's challenge to Washington's Global Positioning System, is one example; the battle over third-generation mobile-phone standards is another. The danger, however, is that two different addressing systems on the Internet may not interoperate perfectly. If it wants to preserve and extend the benefits the Internet currently brings, Washington will have to come up with some way of sharing control with other countries without jeopardizing the network's stability or discouraging free speech and technical innovation.