Internet control

The rhetoric centred on control of the Internet turned out to be just hot air, after a compromise was hammered out at the World Information Summit in Tunis. The US remains in unilateral control. Status quo has been maintained with respect to technical functionality as well as regulatory power. While a multinational body, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) consisting of national governments, corporations and NGOs, has been created, this has "no oversight function and would not replace existing arrangements, mechanisms, institutions or organisations, but involve them and take advantage of their expertise". The forum "would have no involvement in day-to-day or technical operations". Translated, the IGF will act like a scaled-up version of the typical Internet forum. It will allow frustrated users to rant and rave, or to offer useful suggestions. But these suggestions will not be binding.

The non-profit, California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) remains the "sysops" of the Net. ICANN maintains the domain name "root zone file". This is the master list of some 300 generic domains and country suffixes (.com, .org, .info, .uk, .in, .ru, etc), which allows every website to resolve to a unique name/number. ICANN comes under the US department of commerce (DoC). So, the US government by extension retains regulatory control. This control has historically been light. The most high-handed action one can recall was the DoC's recent objection to the creation of a new .xxx domain for porn sites. In theory though, the US government could block an entire sovereign nation from Net access. It could unilaterally impose taxes, outlaw gambling, etc. That power has not been exercised""not even during the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions.

But the European Union, along with major developing nations such as China, Brazil, Cuba and Iran, is leery of the US retaining such untrammelled control. Hence, the demands before Tunis for moving to a multilateral system that would extend "the benefits of the new telecom technologies to all the world's inhabitants". The EU even threatened to withdraw support for the current domain name system (DNS) registration, as did China and Brazil. Such a withdrawal could have caused chaos. You can easily set up many "Internets" but in order to talk to each other, they must have a universally accepted name-resolution system.

The US argued that a multilateral body would be mired in political dispute and would therefore lead to less free speech and more restricted access. Most companies would also prefer to stick with the current system because it works"" if it ain't broke, why fix it? But while a multilateral replacement body may indeed be more bureaucratic, or just less efficient, there are also many efficient multilaterals. For example, the International Telecommunications Union works well""one could argue that the Internet wouldn't exist if the ITU didn't work. Also, while the Chinese or the Iranians may have their agendas with respect to free speech, it would be extremely difficult for any such agenda to be pushed through international forums. The US, on the other hand, can simply issue a fatwa to block access. The Internet has now evolved way beyond the wildest dreams of the cold warriors who funded the original research because they wanted a nuclear-attack resistant network. Next year, ICANN's contract as "sysops" will run out while the IGF will meet in Athens. The same arguments will resurface there.