Behind the Fight to Control the Internet

Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "The battle over control of the Internet and ICann (previously slashdotted here and here) gets placed in broader context in the Wall Street Journal. The article explains the role of 'other nations' discomfort with the U.S. as the world's only superpower, unafraid of taking unilateral action,' a fear intensified by the U.S.'s move to halt the introduction of .xxx domains for pornography sites. In a related column, Frederick Kempe opens the floor for a debate between the diplomat leading talks for the U.S., and the former journalist from Luxembourg leading the effort to move the Internet away from U.S. control. 'Today, in a globalized world in which the Internet has become a global resource for freedom of expression and for economic exchange, this monopolistic oversight of the Internet by one government is no longer a politically tenable solution,' Viviane Reding says. Kempe also suggests ways the two sides can split the difference."

Comments

To preempt some of the more useless comments

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a recap of the technical side of things as they are now:

It is common for a country to host its own TLD servers (the servers which tell you what a particular domain under for example .fr points to). The German DENIC for example operates 11 domain name servers which serve the .de domain from all over the world, including 2 in the USA. Only a few small countries have outsourced the task of serving their own CCTLD to an operator of their choice.

In addition to the CCTLD servers, several countries around the world operate root DNS servers (the servers which for example tell you where to ask about .de). Since almost two years there are more root DNS servers outside the USA than inside. These servers are paid for and administered by organizations outside the USA.

So far, the people who run these root DNS servers have agreed to serve a common "root zone file" as decided on by ICANN. You see, what many people on this forum propose, that "the rest of the world" should start running their own DNS servers and see how that goes, has been in effect for years. If someone in Germany asks for the .com TLD server, then most likely an instance of the K-root-server (in Frankfurt, Germany) will (correctly) answer this question. Someone in the Netherlands gets the answer from another instance of the K-root-server in Amsterdam. People in the United Arab Emirates ask an instance of the F-root-server in Dubai. Nobody needs to be forced by law to use "other" root DNS servers. Everybody already does.

Absolutely the only thing which keeps the DNS from fracturing is the international agreement on a standard definition of the root zone. This agreement is crumbling and if no multilateral solution is found, DNS will become ambiguous.

When people say that users would have to be forced to use alternate servers to make changes take effect, then they clearly don't understand the situation. When they say that everybody uses the US-owned and thus US-controlled internet, then they clearly don't understand the situation. When they say that other countries lack the resources, then they clearly don't understand the situation. It is blatantly obvious that most people who "dare" the rest of the world to try the split have no idea how little stands in the way of that move, both politically and technically.

it's not that simple

[feepcreature]

There is a lot of nonsense talked about "Control of The Internet". In reality it's not that simple. There is no one organisation that controls all of the net. Different functions are carried out by different groups.

Address allocation (to ISPs) is carried out by Regional Internet Registries, from their allocations. For Europe, it is RIPE. ARIN controls the Americas. APNIC controls the Asia and Pacific regions. AfriNIC is Africa. LACNIC does Latin America and the Caribbean. Allocation of addresses TO those organisations (from the scarce IPv4 address pool, and the much more abundant IP v6 pool) is a different question. ISPs allocate addresses in turn to their customers. IPv4 and IPv6 can interoperate (sort of) and IPv6 is quite widely deployed in Asia, where IPv4 addresses are in short supply.

Protocols are defined by groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force and working groups - any internet user can participate, if they know what they are talking about. They are adopted by consensus among internet users (and major ISPs and vendors). To a large degree, the protocols determine how much control there can be over any given internet application (like email, or the web, or internet telephony).

Top Level Domain Names are split into Country names (generally controlled by countries, or their nominees), and Generic ones (where control is awarded by ICANN).

This depends entirely on individual ISPs and Users taking their DNS information from the base name servers (and their descendents) controlled by ICANN. There are alternatives, like OpenNIC, which administer their own root servers and top level domains, like .glue) - any internet user can select these.

It's more complicated than that even :-)

But yes, the US Dept of Commerce controls the department that awards ICANN its power. The rest of the world COULD ignore ICANN if they wanted - but they probably won't. Mostly they don't need to.

It's not THAT bad yet. And the UN could be worse... more interfering... more clueless... more corrupt...