Fwd: [Infowarrior] - In cyberspace, a war over names

[Paul Ferguson <fergdawgster () gmail com>]

FYI,

- ferg (in San Francisco today, attending the ICANN Security Ops closed meeting)


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Richard Forno <rforno () infowarrior org>
Date: Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 10:39 AM
Subject: [Infowarrior] - In cyberspace, a war over names
To:


In cyberspace, a war over names
By: Michelle Quinn
March 12, 2011 07:44 PM EDT

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=1A342EA1-0870-4367-825D-81C9C6408CA4

SAN FRANCISCO — For those who value the free flow of information on
the Internet, there’s only one thing more frightening than having the
U.S. government control the Web.

That would be having the United Nations in charge instead.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers opens its
annual meeting here Monday, and its international board of experts
will go about their jobs of mulling whether .love and .gay and .web
should be added to existing domains like .com, .net and .biz.

But they’ll carry out that work in the midst of a turf fight among the
United States, other governments and free-speech advocates over who
should have control of the domain process.

For now, it’s ICANN, a California nonprofit the Clinton administration
helped create in the early days of the Internet. But President Barack
Obama’s Commerce Department has suggested that countries around the
world retain veto power over new domain names. And countries such as
China and Libya have suggested that the United Nations take control of
the process.

And that has some free-speech proponents alarmed.

“Domain names and numbers are one of the few chokeholds of free
speech,” said Susan Crawford, a former special assistant to the Obama
administration on science, technology and innovation policy. “By
having a government-led institution, it will immediately insert
lowest-common-denominator speech demands into the decision-making
process.”

Recent events have heightened concerns about government control.

Governments in Egypt and Libya blacked out parts of the Internet
during recent protests. Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s seizure of
more than 100 domain names of websites accused of copyright
infringement has sparked cries of First Amendment violations here at
home.

The reason that control of the Internet’s addressing and numbering
system is important is that, in the technical workings of cyberspace,
you have to have a name and number to exist.

The U.S. government is “ganging up with other governments,” charged
Milton Mueller, a professor at Syracuse University who has been
involved in ICANN. “The thing that’s concerning is that if ICANN makes
some kind of deal, who will be cut out of the process? Will ICANN
become a remote, bargaining game between this tiny board and a few
powerful governments?”

The irony is that the Internet was developed as part of a Department
of Defense project some 40 years ago. In 1998, after Web browsers
popularized the new medium, the Clinton administration helped set up

Now, the governance of cyberspace is entering a new age.

“ICANN is embarking on the biggest change in its lifetime,” said Kim
Davies, who is responsible for domain names at ICANN. “Both ICANN and
governments are grappling with what role they play.”

Some lawmakers want to make sure the decisions don’t fall into the wrong hands.

Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.) spoke to those fears in January when
she proposed a House resolution to fight any effort to push control of
the Internet to the U.N. “It has become increasingly clear that
international governmental organizations, such as the United Nations,
have aspirations to become the epicenter of Internet governance,” she
said in a statement. “And I’m going to do everything I can to make
sure this never happens.”

But others argue that ICANN’s model is out of step with the Internet’s
growth and importance. With an estimated 2 billion people online, and
more joining every day, running the Internet should be in the hands of
an international, democratic body, they say.

“Humanity is looking at this small cabal that clearly works with the
U.S. government and wields enormous power over the chief communication
network, and they are saying this is not a participatory, democratic
structure,” said Sascha Meinrath, director of New America Foundation’s
 Open Technology Initiative. “And they are right.”

In a series of meetings next week, ICANN will grapple with some of
these issues as it seeks to create new real estate in the virtual
world. Under ICANN’s proposal, new domain names could be almost
anything — companies such as .cannon or subjects such as .movie, .sex
or .gay.
That move has countries and business groups ruffled. Some governments
object to .sex or .gay as morally offensive. Companies worry about
diluting their brand and having to do battle with new competitors.

The expansion will be the chief topic of ICANN’s weeklong meeting,
which includes a public education session, committee meetings and
public sound-off forums. Former President Bill Clinton is scheduled to
speak Wednesday. The gathering culminates in an open board meeting
Friday. The board is expected to address the new domain-name process
and the results of its meetings with its government advisory
committee.

The board will probably decide on the creation of a new domain name,
.xxx., which has been off and on the table since 2004.

For the most part, the U.S. government, through the Department of
Commerce, has not had a heavy hand with ICANN. But ICANN walks a
delicate line over the perception that the U.S. has a special
relationship with ICANN and an inappropriate control over the
Internet.

Recently, Commerce officials have sent mixed signals about ICANN’s
autonomy, and some observers suggest that the U.S. is pressuring ICANN
to be more responsive to government concerns to stop an effort by some
governments to break away.

Commerce recently proposed to ICANN’s board that a single government
should have veto power over any new domain name application “for any
reason.” Members of ICANN’s government advisory committee rejected
that proposal.

But the question remains: How responsive should ICANN be to
governmental concerns?

In a February speech in Denver, Larry Strickling, an assistant
secretary in Commerce, suggested that if ICANN did not give
governments a seat at the table, they will block more, undermining the
Internet’s entire workings. That “will have impacts on Internet
security as well as the free flow of information,” he said.

This pressure has troubled some.

ICANN “wasn’t meant to be a government entity,” said David Johnson, a
visiting professor at New York Law School who was involved in helping
create the contracts that led to the creation of ICANN. “If the
government committee is purporting to set the rules directly, that’s a
complete destruction of the original goals and may have a lot of
problems with accountability and representative democracy.”

But others say that the U.S. has to walk a fine line in order to keep
the Internet open. To do that, ICANN has to give governments a voice
and needs to be transparent about its decision making.

“The big picture is that the interest of the U.S. government and ICANN
are aligned,” Crawford said. “The model is a good one, and the U.S. is
acting as a good steward.”

ICANN appears to be gearing up for some sort of battle. For the first
time, one of ICANN's officers applied to be a registered lobbyist.

In his application, ICANN's Jamie Hedlund, vice president of
government affairs, stated that among the issues he would work on
would be education on "ICANN's private sector-led, bottom-up policy
development model" and "preserving and enhancing the security and
stability of the Internet's systems of unique identifiers, including
the Domain Name System."
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-- 
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawgster(at)gmail.com
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/

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