subject: EU says internet could fall apart posted: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 11:38:19 +0100
[The problem with the 'walled garden' approach is that users often
are penalised either by no interconnection, high interconnect fees
(due to monopoly power of service providers over gateways), sluggish
performance, and restricted functionality. This issue has been
coming to a head for years. ICANN does suck - the potential for
government abuse sucks too. The real problem here seems to be the
existence of a central core. The real solution, therefore is to
remove the central core from the DNS. At the end of the day, the
root servers are single points of failure and ripe for attack. The
DNS must be redesigned to make it completely distributed, improving
resiliency and security while also removing the problem of who gets
to be King. More articles on this here:
· Developing countries demand share of control
· US says urge to censor underlies calls for reform
Richard Wray
Wednesday October 12, 2005
The Guardian
A battle has erupted over who governs the internet, with America
demanding to maintain a key role in the network it helped create and
other countries demanding more control.
The European commission is warning that if a deal cannot be reached
at a meeting in Tunisia next month the internet will split apart.
At issue is the role of the US government in overseeing the
internet's address structure, called the domain name system (DNS),
which enables communication between the world's computers. It is
managed by the California-based, not-for-profit Internet Corporation
for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) under contract to the US
department of commerce.
A meeting of officials in Geneva last month was meant to formulate a
way of sharing internet governance which politicians could unveil at
the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis on
November 16-18. A European Union plan that goes a long way to meeting
the demands of developing countries to make the governance more open
collapsed in the face of US opposition.
Viviane Reding, European IT commissioner, says that if a multilateral
approach cannot be agreed, countries such as China, Russia, Brazil
and some Arab states could start operating their own versions of the
internet and the ubiquity that has made it such a success will
disappear.
"We have to have a platform where leaders of the world can express
their thoughts about the internet," she said. "If they have the
impression that the internet is dominated by one nation and it does
not belong to all the nations then the result could be that the
internet falls apart."
The US argues that many of the states demanding a more open internet
are no fans of freedom of expression.
Michael Gallagher, President Bush's internet adviser and head of the
national telecommunications and information administration, believes
they are seizing on the only "central" part of the system in an
effort to exert control. "They are looking for a handle, thinking
that the DNS is the meaning of life. But the meaning of life lies
within their own borders and the policies that they create there."
The US government, which funded the development of the internet in
the 60s, said in June it intended to retain its role overseeing
Icann, reneging on a pledge made during Bill Clinton's presidency.
Since Icann was created, the US commerce department has not once
interfered with its decisions.
David Gross, who headed the US delegation at the Geneva talks, said
untested models of internet governance could disrupt the 250,000-plus
networks, all using the same technical standards (TCP/IP), which
allows over a billion people to get online for 27bn daily user
sessions.
"The internet has been a remarkably reliable and stable network of
networks and it has grown at a rate unprecedented in human history,"
he said. "What we are looking for is a continued evolution of the
internet that is technically driven. We do not think the creation of
new or use of existing multilateral institutions in the governance of
essentially technical institutions is a way to promote technological
change."
'Valuable dot'
According to Emily Taylor, director of legal and policy issues at
Nominet, which oversees the address categories such as .co or .org -
root zone files known as top-level domain names - bearing Britain's
.uk suffix, the spat in Geneva was "all about the root - the valuable
dot at the end of domain names".
At present Icann decides what new top-level domain names to create
and who should run the existing domains, in consultation with a panel
called the Governmental Advisory Committee. In practice the GAC
exerts more pressure on Icann than the US department of commerce ever
has. It was at the GAC's urging that a recent request to create more
top-level domain names was reviewed. The commerce department does
have the power to clear Icann's decisions.
Icann's president, Paul Twomey, shares many of the US government
concerns. He is adamant that his organisation should be allowed to
evolve rather than be brushed aside in favour of some untried model
of state-led internet governance.
"We are firmly committed to a multi-stakeholder approach," he said.
"We expect to evolve, we expect to keep changing. We are concerned
about stability [of the internet] and we think it's best to evolve
existing institutions. Our present corporate structure is a matter of
history, not of any particular design."
But designing new structures is exactly what the international
community seems intent on doing. At one end of the spectrum are Iran,
Pakistan and other so-called control-oriented states that want to
create a new governing council for the web to which Icann would be
accountable. The remit of this council seems broad enough to include
questions of content, a worry for advocates of free speech on the
web.
Two week's ago the EU proposed its own structure, which consists of
what it calls a "cooperation model" to deal with Icann and a forum
which would allow governments, interested organisations and industry
to discuss internet issues and swap best practice.
'Lightweight'
"What we are talking about is a governance structure that is
extremely lightweight, where the government oversight of internet
functions is limited just to the list of essential tasks," said one
EU negotiator.
While the forum "does not decide anything, it is a place where people
can come to a view and generally participate in thinking about the
internet and the way it is governed".
The EU plan was applauded by states such as Saudi Arabia and Iran,
leading the former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt to express
misgivings on his weblog: "It seems as if the European position has
been hijacked by officials that have been driven by interests that
should not be ours.
"We really can't have a Europe that is applauded by China and Iran
and Saudi Arabia on the future governance of the internet. Even those
critical of the United States must see where such a position risks
taking us."
But EU negotiators are adamant that they reject calls for state
control of the content of the internet. "None of this is about
content and that is a big difference between the EU position and the
position of China and Brazil," the negotiator said. "The proposals
that came from Brazil and the others to amend our own proposal were
not acceptable, they were trying to drag us closer to their position.
We are very alive to that."
Calls from Argentina for a continuing debate while Icann is
restructured are believed to have garnered support from countries
such as Canada which do not like the perceived power that the US has
over the internet but are wary of opening up the web to overall state
control.
Just before the meeting in Tunis, there will be a three-day gathering
of bureaucrats to try to thrash out a deal on internet governance.
Getting the parties - especially the US - to agree to anything looks
like a near impossible task but Mrs Reding believes it is crucial to
find common ground or see the global communication network
disintegrate.
The firm US stand makes that prospect of an end to ubiquity seem
imminent. Although any decision from the Tunis summit would have no
legal standing, the current deal between Icann and the US government
is due to come to an end in September next year, by which time the
organisation is supposed to be made independent under the deal made
during the Clinton presidency.
Mr Gallagher said that after the Tunis meeting there will be further
discussion with governments and the private sector about the future
of the organisation. "But we are not going to bureaucratise,
politicise and retard the management of the DNS. Period," he said.
"That will not happen. We will not agree to it in November and we
will not do it in September 2006."
Footnotes
Domain Name System
The DNS is the address book of the internet, matching numeric IP
addresses to alphabetic addresses such as www.amazon.co.uk, which
people find easier to remember. But instead of one central list of
everyone's internet address, which would be massive, it splits
addresses into their constituent parts - called domains - and gives
each machine in the network enough information to know where to
locate the next machine down the line. This is known as a distributed
database.
Icann
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a not-for-
profit organisation that manages the DNS. It decides who gets to
operate the most basic domains, the top-level domains such as .com
and .org as well as all the world's country codes. It is responsible
for allocating space on the internet. It was set up in California
under contract to the department of commerce and as such it is
subject to California state law and any disagreements have to be
taken up with that state's courts.
TCP and IP
Internet Protocol (IP) is the technology that allows data to cross
networks, using a destination address (IP address) to make sure it
reaches the right place. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP),
meanwhile, ensures the correct delivery of that data or its re-
transmission if it gets lost. Together they are the tarmac of the
information superhighway.
Root zone file
Although the DNS is a distributed database it needs a starting point,
a list of where to go for the first part of an internet address and
start a search for a particular machine. This list of where to start
is called the root zone file. It is a list of 248 country code top-
level domains (ccTLDs) - such as .uk and .fr - as well as 14 generic
top-level domains (gTLDs), which are subject-based such as .com and
.net and .org. The list, held on 13 machines across the world, says
who runs these domains and where to find them.
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