Tomorrow’s internet, controlled by the powerful; An organisation that is being regulated by everybody might as well be regulated by nobody

March 21, 2014 6:39 pm
Tomorrow’s internet, controlled by the powerful
By Christopher Caldwell
An organisation that is being regulated by everybody might as well be regulated by nobody
The US commerce department announced a week ago that it was ready to relinquish the last part of the internet that the government formally controls: the business of assigning online names and addresses. To those troubled by the extensive National Security Agency programmes Edward Snowden revealed last year, that may sound like good news. Most people would sooner have the world’s internet users regulate the system by consensus than hand over control to the government. Alas, that is not the choice on offer.Since 1998, the commerce department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration has contracted out the naming authority to a California non-profit group called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The link is tight. According to Paul Rosenzweig, who writes for the Lawfare blog, previous deals with the department were written so that “only one entity, Icann, could possibly have won the contract”.
What the US is now suggesting is thus a bizarre-looking transaction. It is not seeking new bidders to compete with Icann for a government contract. It is authorising Icann to regulate on behalf of another authority.
Which authority? It is not clear. Icann will start discussing it at meetings in Singapore this week. Lawrence Strickling, assistant secretary of commerce, warns: “We will not accept a proposal that replaces the NTIA role with a government-led or intergovernmental solution.” So it will not be the UN that regulates the internet, as Russia and China have urged. Stephen Crocker, Icann’s board chairman, has said: “It is up to our global stakeholder community to determine the best route to get us there.” Fadi Chehadé, Icann chief executive, says: “We are being asked to convene the global community.”
The word “stakeholder” is useful in some business contexts, especially to distinguish the interests of a company’s shareholders from those of others affected by its actions: workers, their families, neighbours and so on. But here it is meaningless. When the business in question is the internet, everybody is a stakeholder. In promising that Icann will be regulated by everybody, Mr Chehadé and his US government contacts are essentially saying it will be regulated by nobody. And that means it is likely to follow the interests of the powerful, either the internet’s biggest corporations or some international body (the UN’s International Telecommunications Union, perhaps) that is well sheltered from voters.
Anyway, if there is such a thing as a “global community”, how can we be sure it will consider Icann the best guardian of its interests? Because what “global community” really means is those with a passion for internet governance: for example, Neelie Kroes, the EU digital commissioner; or Dilma Rousseff, the Brazilian president; or the many Germans outraged over revelations of NSA spying. Mr Chehadé himself signed a statement in Montevideo last November in which he expressed “strong concern over the undermining of the trust and confidence of internet users globally due to recent revelations of pervasive monitoring and surveillance”.
And one must not forget the powerful corporations that are just as obsessed with internet governance. Icann is now introducing more than 1,000 new “generic top-level domains” – the last bits in an internet address – to go along with the familiar ones (.com, .edu, et al, and country endings such as .co.uk). It has been criticised for serving the interests of private sector domain name sellers. The proposed extensions – from .beauty and .pizza to .brussels – will aid late-arriving companies that have found many of the best names taken.
But Jay Rockefeller, a Democratic US senator from West Virginia, suspects a bit of a racket as well. He has rightly worried that a planned .sucks domain, for instance, is “little more than a predatory shakedown scheme”. It would be worth any successful dotcom business paying to snap up that address, which in turn makes it worth the while of a company paying the proposed price of $185,000 to Icann to buy it.
The internet is just a bunch of circuits and digits and machinery. It serves the purpose it does because it was developed, and has thus far been policed, by a country that has a certain set of values, for better and for worse. The US is impatient with tradition. It is sometimes superficial. It is always plutocratic. But it also has a First Amendment protecting free speech, which has served as its model in handling internet rulemaking. The American record of protecting the free flow of information is imperfect. But it is worth remembering that the “global stakeholder community” has no such record at all.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard