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News :: International Relations |
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The Battle for the Internet’s Soul |
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by Victor Pickard
Email: vpickard (nospam) uiuc.edu (verified) |
02 Dec 2005
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From the Public i, published by the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, Dec. 2005.
While U.S. media focused attention elsewhere, a power struggle for control of the internet unfolded in Tunis last month at the final phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). The UN-sponsored multi-stakeholder arrangement of governments, industry and civil society began debating global internet policies in Geneva in December 2003. This first phase of WSIS brought 11,000 people together to “define a common vision of the information society.” However, despite being hailed as a brilliantly innovative experiment in global democracy, the summit’s initial focus on important social problems like the global digital divide gradually devolved into a technical dispute over how the internet should be governed. That this technocentric issue became the major focus of the entire summit is telling in itself. Nevertheless, the internet governance debate is important and the larger ramifications deeply disturbing for those who still hope for a democratic internet.
Although the finer details of internet governance can cause even the most hardened policy wonk to lapse into coma, it is at base a simple dilemma. The internet’s daily operations require a network of big computers called root servers that store crucial information, such as top level domain names with suffixes like “.com” and two-letter country codes like “.uk”. The root servers also catalog unique internet protocol numbers (kind of like phone numbers) for each individual computer to connect to the internet. These seemingly innocuous procedures require governance. Generally speaking, as the internet grows in global significance, so too does the clamor for international control. The core of the contentious internet governance debate pits a status quo of U.S. dominance against a growing chorus of countries calling for internationalized governance similar to the existing global phone network. This oversight could fall under the auspices of the U.N. or some new multilateral body.
Beyond U.S. insistence that its unilateral control of the internet is optimal for all countries, the debate is further complicated by one key fact: Deciding how to allot names and numbers is not merely technical but in fact quite political. One glance at the distribution of root servers should be the first clue that something is amiss. Of the 13 servers, 10 are in the U.S., with one each in Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Tokyo. Even more imbalanced is the current system’s distribution of internet protocol numbers, which has left some U.S. universities with more internet protocol numbers than all of China combined. And who controls these servers and makes decisions on assigning names and numbers?
Enter ICANN. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a private, nonprofit corporation based in California. Formed in 1998, ICANN was authorized by the U.S. Department of Commerce to “set policy for and to manage the allocation and assignment of internet protocol addresses; to add new names to the top level of the internet domain name hierarchy; and [be responsible] for operating root servers…” In other words, a private U.S. corporation runs the internet. It is accountable to no one except the U.S. government, which maintains veto power over any decision ICANN makes.
Sometimes ICANN’s decisions can seem arbitrary and culturally insensitive to the global community. One example is the limiting of top-level domain names to Roman script. A more flagrant controversy arose recently when ICANN awarded a “.xxx” top-level domain name to a shady Florida-based business for the purpose of showcasing pornographic content. Representatives of various nations were livid about this decision, but ICANN was comfortably insulated from their fury. Such lack of legitimacy, accountability and transparency belies the democratic rhetoric often associated with the internet and shamelessly promoted by U.S. government and corporate elites. When combined with political questions of allocation, ICANN’s style of governance can seem like a cruel joke.
Add to this perception the small matter of the mysterious 14th server. According to internet governance scholar, Ang Peng Hwa, there is a “hidden server” that reportedly controls the other 13 servers from a secret location in the U.S. He suggests U.S. manipulations of the master server caused the Iraqi .iq domain name to disappear during the 2003 U.S. invasion, thus crashing the entire Iraqi internet. Such occurrences, real or imagined, give countries like Iran and Syria serious pause.
ICANN’s actions continue to invite controversy. Tensions heightened this past summer when the UN-sponsored Working Group on Internet Governance issued a somewhat tepid report calling for more international control of the internet. However, just as the report was coming out the U.S. government made a preemptive strike, officially proclaiming its intention to retain control of the internet indefinitely. The plot thickened the following October when the EU surprised everyone by calling for an international alternative to ICANN to prevent fragmentation of the internet.
Despite these dramatic maneuverings, the status quo prevailed at WSIS. The outright intimidation of the EU––including a high-profile letter from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice––apparently paid off and the EU retreated from its earlier independence. Since its unscathed emergence, some U.S. commentators are celebrating ICANN for its long-awaited legitimacy. On the other hand, global distrust of ICANN’s authority and disgust towards U.S. bullying remains strong. A new UN group called the Internet Governance Forum has been created to encourage an “evolutionary process.” The debate over internet governance promises to continue well into the future.
The idea of one country claiming dominance over a global medium to which a billion people have access (and billions more still do not) seems absurd on its face. There are worse inequities in the world, but this particular injustice screams American hegemony at a time when such unilateral posturing strains beneath the weight of its contradictions. ICANN is a neoliberal fantasy. It champions industry self-regulation, ensures a privileged position for the West over the rest of the world, and, perhaps most strategically, gives the U.S. total veto power over the basic structure of the internet. The rhetoric typically used to cover this agenda is one of deregulation and market fundamentalism. What little news coverage came out during the first phase of WSIS verged on the hysterical, suggesting that if the UN were to take over the internet, Syria and China could read our email. Another tactic has been to suggest that the unique genius of the internet makes it incompatible with regulation (as if ICANN does not regulate).
While many Americans falsely assume the internet is a wild terrain devoid of regulation, a concentration of powerful interests work within undemocratic policy regimes to dictate the type of software we can use, the price of our monthly broadband bill, and the kind of content we’re allowed to access online. Our news media should be reporting more on these debates, but it is also incumbent upon us to seek out information and intervene as often as possible. WSIS may be over, but the battle for a more democratic internet continues. |
This work is in the public domain |
