Globe and Mail Editorial: Regulating the Internet
An unsigned editorial today in The Globe and Mail, in it's entirety.
An international squabble is in progress over who controls the Internet. Since this involves the United Nations, the squabble takes years and requires a great many people to stand up in international forums and deliver windy speeches. The danger is that observers may be bored to death without realizing that the UN is proposing a seismic shift in the way the Net is controlled. Spurred on by such foes of Internet democracy as China, it seeks to place a consortium of governments in charge of a system that is, even now, freeing itself from government control.
The Internet began as a U.S. government defence project. For years, the as-signing of Internet addresses -- and the custody of "top level" domains, suffixes such as .com and .net -- was delegated to Jon Postel, a computer scientist at the University of California, under the watchful eye of the U.S. Commerce Department. In 1998, the department handed the job to a non-profit company registered in California, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). It regulates the basic skeleton of the on-line universe; keeps track of who is entitled to which address; accredits the registrars who assign those addresses (for a fee that is far lower than it used to be); decides when to create a new top-level domain name; and ultimately controls even the 250 or so domain names of countries such as Canada (.ca) and France (.fr). This last bit may explain why the European Union chafes under a system still based in the United States, and why, on Sept. 28, it said it would no longer support a U.S.-based ICANN and would fight for a governmental approach.
ICANN, with an international, elected board of directors, insists there has been no political interference from its U.S. master in the assigning or creation of domain names. By next September, it expects to have a final memorandum of agreement with the Commerce Department that would ensure its independence, democracy, transparency and efficiency. At a June meeting of the UN Working Group on Internet Governance, ICANN protested that its establishment in California "is a consequence of history" and no more than that. "ICANN does not speak on behalf of the United States government. That said, the roles of all governments, including that of the U.S. government, are important, as they share the same interest as all ICANN's stakeholders: namely, a stable and secure Internet."
And it recognized other countries' concerns about relying on a single legal jurisdiction for its dispute-resolution system -- the arbitration that's necessary when, for example, someone in Australia changes his name to Mr. Oxford University and registers http://www.university-of-oxford.com as his site. (Oxford University used ICANN's dispute resolution to seize that site from the Australian. Rogers Cable had less luck in wresting http://www.rogersvideo.com from a Dutch producer of erotic films, and ended up buying the name from the owner.) ICANN says it has started amending its top-level-domain agreements to enshrine its dispute-resolution system "under the auspices of the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris" or similar forums.
The EU and others who would desert ICANN are playing a dangerous game. Internet users around the world need a technical, apolitical regulator free to react swiftly in the service of a free-flowing Net. They would be ill served by a splintered system, and ill served by a stultifying overlay of UN bureaucracy and political control. There is no compelling reason to replace or to hobble ICANN. When the subject comes up again for discussion next month at a UN conference on global communications, participants should see past ICANN's U.S. origin and respect its efforts to regulate the Net without fear or favour.
posted by Fergie @ 10/18/2005 07:02:00 AM
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