Jagadish Gandhi's Blog: World Wide War for WWW, Who will rule it?

The first stop for your search for some information and the great success stories of our time, the Internet, may soon be in for a major change.

The main objective of the United Nations conference World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) to be held this month in Tunisia is to ensure affordable internet access to all the poor countries and to get the full benefits that new information and communication technologies can bring to economic and social development. In all probability this will take the back seat and the summit will turn in to an acrimonious showdown between the United States and the challengers of its monopoly over internet, including the European Union.

On actual Internet-related issues, there's frustration that the countries that got online first - the United States and Western Europe, chiefly - gobbled up most of the available addresses required for computers to connect, leaving developing nations with a limited supply to share. (More in Houston Chronicle)

At issue is control of the web’s “root” servers, which store index information and directories of the entire internet and are maintained by the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), established by the United States in 1998 to take over activities that had been performed for 30 years by professor Jon Postel in California.

Although the U.S. government has largely delegated management ICANN, it has ultimate veto power over all decisions. It has ruled the evolution of the web with little governmental interference, as noted by its record of non-reversal of any ICANN decisions. ICANN manages the current domain-registration system, which means it decides who gets Web addresses ending in ".com," ".net," or ".info," as well as which governmental entities operate national country-code suffixes, such as ".uk" for Great Britain. But ICANN's existing statute is about to expire in September 2006. Suddenly, the very control of the internet is at stake.

At the WSIS summit, countries such as Brazil, China, Cuba, and Iran are expected to call for the creation of an international body to govern the Internet. Nations such as Libya and Rwanda are among others supporting more U.N. participation in ICANN.

Other countries fear the US (through ICANN) can deny and thwart access to the Internet if it so desires. So far that hasn't happened but it doesn't mean it never will, say some diplomats. They want either the UN or an intergovernmental body to have supervisory power and make public policy related to the Internet. (More in Outlook)

The struggle is over an information superstructure that is already the main conduit of world commerce. It is also about free speech and information control. The worst-case scenario is that the Summit ends in disagreement, with the US alone against the rest. This would create the prospect of separate countries or regions going their own ways, setting up parallel systems and generating only fragmentation, duplication and chaos.

….the alternative would be nothing short of net anarchy, a Balkanized virtual world with multiple and incompatible Internets. The losers will be the people who have come to enjoy the endless possibilities of a world at their keyboards. (More in Outlook)

Some common sense would prevent such an outcome. Some countries want the US to hand over control of the Internet to an independent body such as the United Nations. But the UN’s clumsy record on human rights - its Rights Commission was recently chaired by Libya - make the prospect a chilling one. It will be difficult for any country or body to keep the Internet open and free the way the US has kept it. The reason the Internet has functioned well is because Uncle Sam's hand has been light and because the ICANN is professionally run.

A proliferation of the Internet sphere has helped the Asian nations to establish their own Internet exchanges as well as clone (root) servers that replicate the work of the ICANN's servers. A few developing countries also realized that it made ideological sense to have their own servers. Apart from the 13 root servers in the US, there are over 100 clone or mirror servers in other countries... …However, the US-based root servers still control most of the traffic, owning the power to block the mirror or clone servers anywhere in the world. (More in Outlook)

…..ICANN could be retooled to meet the demands of "many governments" to be allowed to take part in policy making and supervision, by allowing "equal participation" on its board and establishing clear, transparent and predictable rules and procedures. (More In eWeek)

U.S. will definitely fight hard to protect its hegemony over internet as it has invested in establishing it, maintained and developed it for the last 35 years. The Internet – which was initially developed by U.S. military under the aegis of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Any move to dethrone it from the helm is expected to draw fierce opposition from the U.S., which holds firm to the belief that any change in the status quo would jeopardize the Internet's ability to function as a medium of free expression.

The United States deserves our thanks for having developed the Internet and made it available to the world. Let us hope an acceptable compromise - that reduces government intervention to a minimum and guarantees freedom of expression -will be found at the WSIS. If not, it would be best to leave things as they are.