George WWW.Bush’s Internet

On Nov. 18, the United Nations (UN) World Summit on the Information Society (with the obligatory acronym “WSIS”) ended. Nothing groundbreaking happened, but that’s simply to utter a truism of UN functions. The summit did, however, put on display yet more signs of animosity towards the U.S.

In case you haven’t noticed, America’s standing in the world isn’t what it once was. Only two years ago the European Union was all-aboard in allowing the U.S. to continue “governing the Internet.” But that, alas, is no more. Most European nations, as well as many other foreign governments, are now uncomfortable with the United States’ control over the Internet. But how does the U.S. really “control” the Internet?

The Internet is commonly perceived as an amorphous and decentralized network which evades regulation. According to Leonard Kleinrock, a computer scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, asking exactly who controls the Internet is like asking “who controls the flow of the ocean.”

Yet it must be possible to control the Internet in some way. Currently an American company known as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) handles many aspects of Internet governance. It controls the assignment of domain names, Internet Protocol numbers, and country specific extensions (like .ca for Canada and .de for Germany). ICANN was founded in 1998 by the Clinton administration and operates, at least in theory, free from the interference of the U.S. government, although ICANN does have a “memorandum of understanding” with the Department of Commerce.

ICANN’s activities, according to human rights icons like China and Iran, are an unconscionable infringement of other nations’ rights by the American corporate-governmental cabal. Of course China and Iran (and for that matter Tunisia, the aptly chosen sight of the conference) would, if they controlled domain-name assignments, never, ever misuse this power to crush dissidents.

His Excellency Mohammad Solaymani, Iran’s minister of communication and technology, for one, said that “Internet governance should be transparent and democratic”—sort of like the governance on his home turf. He also said that it is the “undeniable right of all nations” to participate in the regulation of the Internet, and he decried the “current unilateral management of this global facility…subject to the interests and politics of a certain geographical jurisdiction willing to keep absolute control over Internet governance.”

If only we would listen to the Solaymanis of the world. If only the Internet were controlled by the UN or some other supra-national and super-sovereign entity, then we could get wonderfully diverse opinions about Internet governance, and China could better censor websites that contain words such as “liberty” or “Tiananmen Square.”

Luckily, the usual gang of anti-Americans didn’t succeed at the Summit. Instead, there were a few vapid bureaucratic proclamations about healing the technology gap between rich and poor nations by bridging the “digital divide” (a phrase so overused that it, too, may require an acronym before long).

So the Internet remains in the hands of George.WWW.Bush’s American Empire, and it seems safer, freer, and better for that. For now, we can be thankful, if wary, that a conference on the Internet held in Tunisia produced about as much as can be expected.



Charles R. Drummond ’09, a Crimson editorial comper, lives in Canaday Hall.