Global hackers

The U.N.’s attempt to control the internet

By Nick Martin
From the December 2005 Print Edition

Al Gore did not invent the Internet. This much we know. And more so, the United Nations, European Union, and France also did not invent the Internet. In its infancy, the Internet was actually pushed and funded by the Departments of Defense and Commerce before Silicon Valley largely took the helm. It thus seems a peculiar and overtly political power grab that the United Nations recently took steeps to seize authority for governing the Internet from the United States.

Centered in this debate is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the keeper of the Internet’s “golden key,” the Domain Name System (DNS), which helps users find their way around the Internet using words instead of numbers. Basically, it’s the system that gives up Web site names, so loyal Patriot readers only have to remember “www.calpatriot.org” instead of our Web site’s Internet Protocol address “64.91.241.139” (And yes, we did the exhaustive research — that is our real IP address.)

In addition to ensuring that the net is easy to navigate, Icann also manages the .com, .edu, and .uk type suffixes for general Web sites and specific country sites. Broadly speaking, the organization’s role is to promote the global operational stability and high level organization of the Internet, an extremely important task given the astounding impact the Internet has had on the world economy.

The UN thinks the United States isn’t up for the job and is attempting a technological coup of the World Wide Web. Developing nations in particular, led by China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, are working to force the United States to relinquish its oversight role of the Internet and have proposed such “solutions” as creating a Global Internet Council “anchored in the United Nations.” This council would “take over the functions relating to international Internet governance currently performed by the Department of Commerce of the Unites States government.”

These efforts have met harsh opposition from U.S. officials in the State Department and many Republican and Democratic members of Congress. In a recent op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Senator Norm Coleman writes that it “is wantonly irresponsible to tolerate any expansion of the U.N.’s portfolio before that abysmally managed and sometimes corrupt institution undertakes sweeping, overdue reform” and that it would be “equal folly to let Icann be displaced by the U.N.’s International Telecommunication Union, a regulatory redoubt for those state telephone monopolies most threatened by the voice over Internet protocol revolution.”

The United Nations is wholly unqualified to manage the complexities of Internet governance at the pace high technology demands. By nature, the United Nations is a deliberative body that spends months and often years negotiating and compromising over single issues. Internet technology has flourished in the United States, and by extension globally, because of competitive corporate leadership and not top-down government bureaucracy. In reference to the proposed U.N. takeover, author Milton Mueller states that “... the idea of the council is so vague. It’s not clear to me that governments know what to do about anything at this stage apart from get in the way of things that other people do.” The speed of technology should be the pace of business, not of statesmen who often are seeking to undermine the United States at every available opportunity.

Furthermore, the knowledge base of the Internet and information technology lies squarely in the United States. In fact, Icann is headquartered in California, along with nearly every other online innovator of the last fifty years. Despite the vision of U.N. officials, Geneva is not and will not become the world’s information technology hub. The unspoken fact at the United Nations is that U.S. management of the Internet has been wholly successful and has ushered the world into an unpredicted age of freedom of information, only restricted by authoritarian states, who are the ones seeking to wrest control of the Internet from the United States. China, for one, routinely monitors e-mails and chat rooms to silence voices of political dissent, and Tunisia, the site of the recent World Summit on the Information Society, where the objections to U.S. control were outlined, also heavily restricts press freedoms.

This is a power grab, plain and simple. The United Nations hasn’t listed any failings of the United States in controlling the Internet; they’ve just figured, “Well, if the United States controls it, it must be unfair.” But we control it for a reason, a reason more complex than the simple concept of “finders, keepers.” We control the Internet because we don’t control ourselves; the market does. And the market, for all its flaws, is the premier arbiter of who succeeds and fails, even online. The market is efficient, a quality we cherish and the United Nations deplores. If we relinquish the control over such a vital shunt of the world economy, politics will overwhelm real advancement.

Allowing politicians to seize control of the Internet’s “golden key” would needlessly bureaucratize one of the most significant technologies of the last century. A world where supply and demand and not international technocrats manages the crux of the developing global economy works just fine for me.

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