[Ecommerce] International Herald Tribune: Tug of war over Net takes center stage

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/13/business/net.php


*Tug of war over Net takes center stage*

*By Victoria Shannon* International Herald Tribune
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2005

*PARIS*
<http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?query=3DPARIS&sort=3Dswishrank> When
Libya lost the use of its Internet domain ".ly" for five days last year,
it needed help from a California agency that reports to the U.S.
Commerce Department. Anyone looking to do business with an .ly Web site
or e-mail an .ly address was likely met with a "file not found" or "no
such person" message. For anyone on the Internet, Libya was just not there.

In a day when Internet access is critical to world commerce - let alone
casual communication - even a five-day lapse is a hardship. And when one
government needs another to let its citizens be visible again on that
net, it can be a damaging blow to its own sovereignty, as well as
perhaps a matter of national security, even if the cause was a dispute
over payments, as in the Libyan case.

What if, by historical chance, it was France or Britain that controlled
country domain names on the Internet? Would the United States settle for
asking another government to fix its own addresses?

That kind of power to hinder or foster freedom of the Internet,
centralized in a single government, is the crucial issue for many of the
12,000 people expected in Tunisia this week for the United Nations
summit meeting on the information age.

Managing operators of country-level domain names like .ly, .de and
.co.uk is one way that the United States, through the California-based
nonprofit agency Icann, controls the Internet. This organization is a
consequence of the network's development from research in U.S.
universities, laboratories and government agencies in the 1970s.

Icann, which is short for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers, serves as a central authority in what is an essentially
decentralized, neutral and ungoverned global network of networks. So
that one computer can easily find another, Icann runs the addressing
system, giving out blocs of unique identifiers to countries and private
registries.

It was the Icann board, for instance, that moved ahead on a new .xxx
suffix for Internet addresses to indicate adult-rated content this
summer, but it postponed action after objections from the Commerce
Department.

Four years of high-level talks on Internet governance conclude with the
Tunis summit meeting, and on its eve, a figurative ocean separates the
U.S. position - that the Internet works fine as it is - from most of the
rest of the world, including the European Union, which says that the
Internet has become an international resource whose center of gravity
must move away from Washington.

Whether these final debates break the deadlock and produce any agreement
to give other governments more sway over Internet policy was in some
doubt last week. Even a recent discussion of Internet governance between
President George W. Bush and Jos=E9 Manuel Barroso, president of the
European Commission, had not brought the sides any closer.

"Our strong preference is to have a document that everyone can be proud
of," said David Gross, deputy assistant secretary of state, who is
leading the U.S. delegation, along with Michael Gallagher, assistant
secretary of commerce.

"We would be sorely disappointed not to have a document at all, but that
would be better than to have a bad document," Gross said from Tunis,
where the negotiations resumed Sunday before the official start of the
summit meeting Wednesday. On Sunday, the talks stretched past 10 p.m.
and were largely about reiterating positions and defining common ground,
participants said; discussions Monday would focus on Internet governance.

A delegate from the European Union insisted that the EU's call for a new
intergovernmental body to set the principles for running the Internet
still stands and that the solitary U.S. relationship with Icann "is not
sustainable" in the long term.

The official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to
speak for the delegation, conceded that the EU statement, which took
talks in September by surprise and led to the current stalemate, "needs
to put some skin on what is now a little bony. There is a need for
clarification," which the EU delegation was preparing over the weekend.

But he maintained that the 25-member European contingent was unanimous
in its stance, which he called "a middle ground between two extremes:
those who are for a complete overhaul and those who are for the status
quo."

Gross and other Americans dismiss the EU view as "top-down" control of
the Internet, as opposed to the private-sector-led, "bottom-up" approach
of Icann.

The debate is likely to bog down before the summit meeting ends Friday
over the use and meaning of words like "forum," "intergovernmental,"
"governance" and "policy," many participants say.

But however "multistakeholder" or other diplomatic argot is interpreted
in Tunis, the essential problem is that "the United States holds most of
the cards, and if it isn't willing to give any up, it can't be forced
to," said Milton Mueller, a partner in the Internet Project, a nonprofit
group.

When the first part of the summit meeting took place in Geneva two years
ago, many participants feared that the United Nations itself, through
the International Telecommunication Union, wanted to govern Internet
issues. "Today," Mueller said, "the ITU is off the table."

But Mueller, a participant in the meeting and a longtime Icann observer,
said the Americans had handled their position poorly in the face of
global opposition since then. The Bush administration and U.S. business
interests, he said, had "thought they could just ride it out."

"Americans are so parochial when it comes to these things," he said.
"They have no idea how it sounds to 200 other countries when they say,
'The Internet really is nongovernmental - except for us.' Why were they
so surprised? In the U.S., that contradiction becomes invisible to you."

Although Mueller expects the U.S. delegation to "make as few concessions
as possible" this week, he does see some longer-term movement on the
American position.

Two weeks ago, at a conference that Mueller attended, a Commerce
Department official said the U.S. government was planning to put up for
public bidding contracts for managing the Internet addressing system now
held by Icann through its Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

If that happened, a group like the Brussels-based Council of European
National Top-Level Domain Registries, known as Centr, probably would be
interested in bidding for the contract, which has no monetary value, as
would other non-U.S. interests.

The agreement by which Icann operates under Commerce Department
oversight expires next September. Though the U.S. government indicated
in June that it would not let its oversight of the master file that
decodes Internet addresses lapse despite the agreement, Mueller says the
summit meeting fireworks might lead the Bush administration to consider
other options that are not so unilateral.

Yet such small, longer-term steps may not be soon enough in coming for
some developments. Two separate trends are heralding a massive demand
for unique Internet addresses of the kind that Icann manages, and global
participants are eager that the policy and political questions be
settled quickly.

One trend is the move by media businesses to make their products
available online. Each song, video clip, book or other digital content
requires its own unique identifier to locate it on the Internet, even if
the file is not a Web site per se.

The other is the desire of manufacturers and wholesalers to embed their
physical products with radio tags for inventory and other supply-chain
management. To be tracked over the Internet, each tag needs its own
Internet "address" as well, leading to what the ITU is calling an
"Internet of things."

Paul Twomey, the Australian who is chief executive of Icann, said that
the cooperative and democratic Internet was unlike any other network
that had been governed so far - not like the world's railroads, the
postal systems or telecommunications - and so required a fresh, untried
approach.