The Hindu Business Line : US occupation of cyber-space continues

The Bush Administration is characteristically intent on retaining - and possibly enhancing - the role of the US in Internet management. And its intentions have been all too clear long before the current face-off.

Pune , Oct. 6

THE US appears to be as intent on retaining its hegemony in cyber-space as in the real world.

Thus, last week's the United Nations meeting at Geneva, Prepcon-3, which was held to finalise the document on Internet governance for submission to the international community at the World Summit on the Information Society and Internet Governance (WSIS) in November, ended inconclusively with several governments demanding that the US relinquish its unilateral control over Internet governance in favour of a new body under the oversight of the international community or the UN, and the US Ambassador, Mr David Gross, refusing to budge from his country's position that the UN "will not be in charge of the Internet - period."

With the Bush Administration's extending its policy of isolationism through idiocy to cyberspace and even its ally, the European Union (EU), calling for an end to the US Department of Commerce's unilateral authority over Internet governance, the US now stands as completely isolated in cyberspace as in most parts of the real world.

Currently, ICANN (the International Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers), a private non-profit company based in California and under the authority of the US Department of Commerce, oversees IP address space allocation, domain name system management and other technical aspects.

ICANN's hegemony has many critics, including the UN's Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG), which recently published proposals for reforming Internet governance.

These proposals, the basis for the Prepcon-3 parleys, which ended in a deadlock, include:

* The creation of a new UN-based Global Internet Council, which will be overseen by governments and other stakeholders, to take over Internet governance from ICANN;

* The retention of ICANN as the body in charge - set off by the strengthening of its Governmental Advisory Committee;

* The restriction of ICANN's role to a narrow technical one, accompanied by the establishment of an International Internet Council to take over oversight functions; and

* The creation of three new bodies for technical management, debate among governments, businesses and the public and Internet-related public policy.

And then again, a group of governments called the Likeminded Group, comprising Brazil, Iran, Cuba, China and others, had come together to bring about an end to the US control of the Internet.

Interestingly, the EU was not expected to support the Likeminded Group but, in the wake of the US show of intransigence, is now in talks with the group on a joint proposal for an alternative governance system.

Internet governance has been a deeply contentious and divisive issue since the first phase of the WSIS in December 2003, and, the way things are going now, will continue to be so at the second phase of the summit at Tunis in November. The Tunis meeting, billed to begin on November 16, is being held to approve a plan for extending use of the Internet and other forms of advanced communications to help poorer countries achieve UN development goals by 2015.

The WSIS is intended to address certain fundamental Internet issues - coordination between governments on the distribution of costs, mechanisms for international dispute resolution, consumer rights, freedom of expression, spam, cyber-crime and so on.

As Ms Sarah Parkes, a spokesperson for the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN's telecommunications body and the lead agency behind the summit, has pointed out, the WSIS is "not just a platform for future IT development, but a foundation for future national legislation as well."

However, the Bush Administration is characteristically intent on retaining - and possibly enhancing - the role of the US in Internet management. And its intentions have been all too clear long before the current face-off.

According to a statement published in July on the Web site of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (www.ntia.doc.gov), part of the Commerce Department, the US "intends to preserve the security and stability" of the technical underpinnings of the Internet and will "maintain its historic role in authorising changes or modifications" to the master file of Internet domain names.

This file is used to translate Internet addresses into numeric locations that computers linked to the Internet can find.

With the US now proving adamant about not being prepared to take any "action that affects the security and stability of the Domain Name System," the debate in progress will almost certainly get mired in squabbles over the management of the DNS root zone, technical oversight of Internet infrastructure and other equally narrow issues.

WGIG, quite understandably, is opposed to the US position and holds that "no single government should have a pre-eminent role in relation to international Internet governance."

Other bodies and persons are intensely concerned that what is perceived as the entrenched unilateralism of the US may cause disaffected countries to establish their own domain name systems in parallel to the existing network, thereby fragmenting the Internet.

Yet others, especially Web surfers, say that the squabbling between the US and just about everybody else has resulted in the neglect of pressing issues — cyber-crime and spam, for instance — the effective control of which requires the active involvement of governments.

And then there are those who hold that the sole control of the Internet by the US is not be desirable but the assignment of this control to the UN may result in its politicisation and in the grant of influence to non-democratic countries over a system almost synonymous with freedom of expression.

It bears noting here that the US has, in reality, managed the Internet with a very light hand through ICANN.

The need experienced by various countries to get the US to give up its supervision of "root zone files" which lie at the core of the Internet addressing system can, therefore, only be construed as an expression of their deep distrust of the Bush Administration.

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