US
CAN And Others CAN’T: The Story of ICANN

Prabir
Purkayastha

THE
recently concluded World Information Summit in Tunisia last month was supposed
to address the yawning digital divide: both between nations and within nations.
Instead, most of the public focus was in who would control the Internet, not
only the information highway of today but also a major channel for global
commerce. Though the results from the summit was not decisive, the issues
somehow getting pushed under the rug for the time being, it is increasingly
clear that an Internet controlled by the US as it is today is not acceptable to
the rest of the world.

To
understand who controls Internet, we must see how it functions. To the
uninitiated, it is the final frontier with no controls by anybody and with
complete freedom from all national authorities. In reality, the final arbiter of
the Internet is the US Department of Commerce who has delegated the day-to-day
administration of the net to Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
(ICANN), a private-sector body that operates it under a contract. When we type
in web address, this is dissolved into a physical address of a specific computer
on the net by a set of rootservers. The key issue here is just as a telephone
number dialled by anyone anywhere in the world will always go to that specific
phone, so will the address we type go to a unique computer address.

FOUR
ISSUES

For
all this to work seamlessly, there are four issues that need to be addressed. The
first issue is that somebody must decide who will operate the database
of generic names ending with suffixes such as “.com,”
“.net,” “.info,”, a privilege that yields handsome profits.
Also, someone must appoint the operators of two-letter country-code suffixes,
such as “.cn,” for China. The second issue is that the
numeric address also needs to be regulated so that no two computers have
identical addresses. The third issue pertains to root servers, 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.
There are 13 root servers in the world, ten of them in the US and one each in
Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Tokyo. The fourth and final issue is
that, there are technical standards that must be formally established and
coordinated to ensure that the Internet system works. This means the message
sent over the Internet will be interpreted the same way by all machines and
other equipment on the net.

ICANN
CONTROL

The
battle whether the Internet should continue to be controlled exclusively by
ICANN, a private body answerable to the US has been joined by a large number of
countries. Even the European Union, initially lukewarm to the idea of
challenging the US hegemony finally came out for a larger international voice in
running of the Internet. For a
number of countries, the issue is not what the US has done but what it can
potentially do. Technically, the US can delete .ir from the rootserver by which
all the sites in Iran ending with .ir would fall off the Internet. The US could
impose this at any time if it felt like under the current dispensation and that
it has not done so in the past is scant comfort for many countries. The mere
threat of such an exercise of power would be a very real threat, particularly in
an era where the Internet is also the critical for various economic activities.
From freezing Iran’s monies in its banks across the world, which it did in the
1980s to freezing, its Internet “account” is not such a long step as
people may imagine. Therefore, countries are challenging the power that the US
has today to impose its will on the Internet by virtue of controlling all the
domain names.

PROBLEMS
WITH THE EXISTING SYSTEM

While
controlling the domain names is one obvious way of flexing of the US muscle,
there are very many other exercises of power that the US routinely does. The
rootservers and domain name registration are money-spinners for private
companies who control domain registrations. Obviously, all such domain name
registration contracts are with the US companies. The second part is the cost
that servers pay to connect to the Internet. If they are far away from existing
Internet infrastructure, the costs can be very high. Obviously, this means
the poorer countries are affected more adversely than richer countries that are
already covered by such infrastructure. The third problem lies with the script
that the rootservers understand: all addresses have to be in the roman script
for it to be understood by rootservers, making it difficult for the non-English
speaking Chinese or Arabic population to access Internet that easily.

Many
of these problems are important but not so crucial as the problem with next
generation of Internet issues that are coming up. Most of all they pertain to
making the network work for everybody in a way that it will not lead to global
monopolies. Internet is not the
place for proprietary standards but all parties have to cooperate on the issue
of open standards so that Internet can never be a place for creating private
monopolies. Though the ICANN and other bodies have tended to keep out
proprietary standards and software till now, as the system is completely
privatised, such systems can pass into the hands of a few companies. They can
then impose their solutions on the world and hold everybody to ransom by virtue
of their monopoly exercised through ICANN. The other future issue is that the
Internet has to expand and expands very quickly. Already the 4 billion addresses
originally envisaged for the net is proving insufficient. Any expansion will
need all the players in the world to agree. If they do not, the net will
fragment to the detriment of everybody. Such an agreement is more difficult if
one country tells the rest that it has the right to decide what is best for
everybody.

The
third and the most important future issue is that the current system of the net,
while it has allowed a large degree of freedom to everybody to do what they want
on the net, it has also allowed spamming (unwanted flood of emails) and hacking
with relative immunity. Today, spamming is a real menace with people arguing
that its growth is far greater than real emails and will completely drown out
all real emails very soon. While this view may be alarmist, but the menace
of spamming is very real on the net today. There is no way we can address the
issues of security on the net and spamming etc., without international
co-operation. And with the attitude that the US has, “we invented it and
therefore we own it”, there is very little likelihood of such a
co-operation coming through.

THE
US INTRANSIGENCE

The
Tunis summit finally agreed to allow the US to continue its current role of
administering the net with an international advisory committee, which will
presumably sort out issues with ICANN.
While this is a temporary truce at best, the real issues of how to sort out in a
global co-operative framework still remain. And
in this the US still remains intransigent: it believes in its divine right to
rule the internet the same way as it sees its divine right to bomb Iraq to
democracy. The same way it believes that Geneva conventions on torture and
prisoners apply to all countries who do not have a hot line to god the same way
as George Bush has; the US is obviously free of such obligations.

Although,
controlling the creation of domain names and locations of root servers are
important issues, there are much larger issues at stake here. Should we allow
the US and some private corporations to dominate and decide the future of
Internet? Or should all the national governments jointly address the problems
the Internet is facing today? While
the Tunis summit may have won the US a temporary reprieve, there is no way this
issue of control of the Internet is going to go away.