The Internet Under Control

Le Monde | Editorial

Wednesday 16 November 2005

Must the United States keep hold of the Internet's reins? Many countries, from those of the European Union to Argentina, but also countries with undemocratic regimes, from China to Iran, plead for the "internationalization" of the Internet's management. This debate should animate the Global Summit on the Information Society that takes place in Tunis until November 18. Even if that issue was removed at the summit's opening with the announcement of a "compromise" maintaining the status quo - over which the American negotiator David Gross immediately congratulated himself - the fundamental debate, just like the question of reducing the "digital fracture" between rich and poor countries, will continue into the future.

How to "internationalize' the Internet? The options, liberal or governmental, all aim at breaking the relationship that submits the Net's management and administration to the American Commerce Department's authority. Historically, the Internet is an American creation. American companies, researchers, and engineers invented it for the most part. Ever since, the United States has held virtually all related powers. It could, if it wanted, "unplug" a country. If Washington conceived the notion, it could make all sites inscribed ".fr" inaccessible. It would be enough for it to act through a single computer, the "ultimate root," which orchestrates the operation of the twelve "root servers" on the planet. Maintained in a secret location, this Grand Master of the Net is controlled by Icann, a private non-profit company placed under the authority of the American Commerce Department.

The United States pleads for maintenance of this structure, arguing the necessity of "preserving the security and stability" of the operation Icann assures. If the US admits the legitimacy of countries' demands to manage their "domain name" and considers that dialogue must be continued, it is difficult to see any change in US insistence on maintaining the status quo. The reaffirmation, in an official declaration June 30, of the "capital importance" the Internet assumes for the United States clearly expresses the US will to retain ultimate control over it.

Is this position tenable? Or, reversing the question, will the Internet gain from passing into international control? Two visions clash. That of the American "guarantee" is legitimated by the Internet's history. Internationalization is inscribed in its development. The Internet is already used by a billion people. In number of those "connected," Asia leads, followed by Europe; North America is now behind. In two decades, the Internet has escaped sole exercise by the United States. The greater part of its development today is commercial, cultural, or scientific. Its political role has become unavoidable and its strategic importance, vital.

Washington refuses to give way to the international community, by invoking the necessity of excluding any hold over the Net by non-democratic states. A weighty argument, when one knows that the UN agreed to have the Global Summit in a country that imprisons its own Internet users. Certainly, if authoritarian states were to have control over their principal domain name, they would see their power strengthened. But the Internet conveys as much propaganda as it does dissent. Democracy can only gain when such a means of communication and expression develops. Supposing that the desire for democracy to prevail is not a mere pious wish, to confide the keys of the Internet to an international organization commonly accepted by all then seems to be plain common sense. Unless one assumes that today only Washington is capable of assuring the security of the virtual network, as it does that of the real world.




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Lesser Evil
By Patrick Sabatier
Libération

Thursday 17 November 2005

Kofi Annan should have begun by applying the principle he enunciated yesterday in Tunis ("The information society is unthinkable without freedom.") to himself first. That way he would have avoided the ridiculous spectacle of this Summit on the Information Society taking place in a Sultanate where the UN's own experts observe that freedom of information is an extinct species.

The "digital fracture" between developed countries and others is, of course, a real problem. Just as the question of governance of the network of networks is legitimate. In its essence as well as by multinational vocation, the Internet cannot remain eternally under the control of a single country, the United States, through the guardianship it exercises over Icann, the private company that manages "domain names" - the addresses that allow traffic to flow over the information highways. Icann must cut the umbilical cord that links it to Washington.

But it's a good thing, a lesser evil, that the offensive that authoritarian regimes - which would like Net governance to be consigned to the UN under cover of the struggle against "American dominance" - should have failed. The compromise, a European inspiration adopted in Tunis, leaves management of the network to Icann. At the same time, it also opens an international forum for discussions in which questions of regulation (anti-spam and anti-virus fights, cyber-criminality) could be addressed. Furthermore, this forum must place at the head of its agenda the issue of freedom on the Internet, from censorship and repression, especially in the fifteen countries - with Tunisia at their head - that imprison their internet users as the report from Reporters Without Borders, the conclusions of which we are publishing, establishes.



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Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher.