The Internet: Will there be a regime change?

The U.S. was able to block a challenge to its control of the Internet at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis on Nov. 16-18. “The U.S. can claim a short-term victory but faces a long-term war of attrition that will gradually erode its position,” predicts Milton Mueller of the Internet Governance Project.

The challenge was directed at ICANN—the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

ICANN was set up in 1998 by the Clinton administration at about the same time Vice President Al Gore was telling Wired News that he’d invented the Internet. ICANN was set up to move direct control of Internet names and addresses from an office in the U.S. Department of Commerce into the hands of a private, non-profit corporation.

ICANN was really an attempt to hide U.S. government control of the Internet behind the façade of an independent agency, while at the same time privatizing the lucrative Internet domain-name business. Domain names are the easy-to-remember names found on the Web, like www.cnn.com. When a user requests a page by the domain name, the name is looked up on a Domain Name Server. The name is matched to a numbered address used by the computer to reach the requested Web site.

Network Solutions, under contract to ICANN, was allowed to control the new, privately owned billion-dollar domain-name business. Network Solutions immediately engaged in price-fixing, setting a minimum price to be charged for names and putting a toll on every name change.

Network Solutions is now owned by Verisign, which altered the domain-name system so that all Internet users who might get lost on the Web are redirected to its own advertisement-filled search site. Verisign was also behind the Crazy Frog scandal, a marketing scam that bilked tens of millions of dollars from cell-phone users, mostly in Britain. Under pressure from the U.S. government, ICANN has agreed to give Verisign total control of .COM, including steep price increases.

When the Clinton administration created ICANN, the claim was made that ICANN would only temporarily be a private, U.S.-controlled corporation and that control of Internet names and addresses would be turned over to an international, non-governmental organization by the year 2000.

That never happened, although in each succeeding year pronouncements were made that said the goal was to turn control over to an international agency. But in June of this year, the U.S. Department of Commerce reversed that statement and said unequivocally that the U.S. intends to keep control of the Internet through ICANN. Period. As one might guess from the fact that the Commerce Department is calling the shots, U.S. business interests are dictating this policy.

The Commerce Department statement opened up the battle that played out in Tunis in November. The European Union, Brazil, China, Iran and Pakistan were the leading challengers to U.S. unilateralism.

The Bush administration also made it clear that ICANN is not an independent organization when, in August, it overruled an ICANN decision to set up a new .XXX domain. As ICANNWatch reported at the time, “It is now clear that by sending its letter of Aug. 12 blocking approval of the .XXX domain, the U.S. government has done more to undermine ICANN’s status as a non-governmental, multi-stakeholder policy body than any of its Internet governance ‘enemies’ in the ITU, China, Brazil, or Iran.” The ITU is the Inter national Telecommunications Union.

At the Tunis summit, Communications Minister Ignacio Gonzalez Planas of Cuba summarized the issues differently from what is heard from the European Union or other business rivals of the United States:

“The new information and communication technologies, far from becoming a means to move towards a fair world, and a more harmonic and equitable development, have contributed to deepen inequality and injustice, and have become an additional obstacle for the progress of the poor countries.

“The promising technological scenario which is being predicted is framed by the existing unfair international economic order and the neoliberal nature of the current globalization process, turning extraordinary achievements of people’s intellect into privileges which are enjoyed by just a few countries.

“A few examples confirm these realities: In the United States and Canada there are 74 computers and 60 fixed phone lines per 100 inhabitants. In Africa there are 1.76 computers and 3.09 fixed lines per the same amount of people. Only 15 percent of the 6 billion inhabitants of the planet have Internet access. Out of them, 51.9 percent belongs to the United States, Canada and Europe, and only 2.5 percent to Africa.

“More than half of the world’s population does not have telephone access, which was invented more than a century ago. Forty percent of the telephone lines are found in just 23 developed countries, where less than 15 percent of the world population lives.

“More than 50 percent of the clients of the cell phone services and the Internet servers are found in developed countries. Without the actual democratization of the access to technological development, all the predictions regarding a new global economy, based on informatics and communications, and the transit towards the so-called ‘Information Society,’ will continue to be impossible for the vast majority of humanity.”

Gonzalez concluded: “Moving towards the so-called ‘Information Society’ requires, first of all, a world free of hun ger, ignorance, unhealthiness, discrimination and exclusion. The hungry, sick, illiterate and excluded will never be able to understand the use of new technologies. We want to have a world in which the benefits of science and technology can be real tools to achieve progress for all the inhabitants of the planet.”