Does the Internet Need to be Governed?
By: Vinton Cerf
November 04, 2004
<http://www.circleid.com/article/795_0_1_0_C/>
Does the Internet Need to be Governed?
In its earlier years, the Internet was simply a tool for the research and
education community to explore new ways of sharing computing power,
software, and information by way of electronic mail (which became a popular
application around 1971 on one of the Internet's predecessors, the ARPANET).
The approximately one billion users of the Internet today have the same
range of interests as the general population in most countries. The
side-effect of this wide spread use is that abuses have arisen that are not
unlike the kinds of abuses one finds in other societal settings. Fraud,
misinformation, harassment, illegal transactions, theft of resources,
breaking and entering (hacking into computers), copyright infringement, and
many other exact or approximate electronic analogs of improper behavior can
be found on the Internet. Such problems plainly raise public policy concerns
among governments and stimulated much interest during the many talks
associated with the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).
The term "Internet Governance" has become an area of particular attention in
part as a consequence of widespread recognition that the Internet represents
an important area of national interest for all countries seeking to
participate in the benefits of global electronic commerce, distance
learning, access to the encyclopedic wealth of information on the Internet,
and in the social dimension that the Internet is creating. From the
perspective of governments, the Internet is simultaneously a technology that
promises high economic value for parties making use of it and a challenge in
that it is unlike all other telecommunications media previously invented.
While traditional telephony, broadcast radio and television and cable
television, as well as satellite communication have tended to evolve in a
regulated setting, the Internet has been a "grass-roots" phenomenon,
operating essentially above the traditional regulated environment. Internet
runs on top of the telephone network, or its underlying dedicated circuitry.
It works on broadcast and point-to-point radio, point-to-point satellite,
optical transmission links and virtually any other communications medium. It
was designed to work that way. As a consequence, it has had the advantage of
rapid innovation by users at the "edge" of the network, largely without much
or any regulatory interference. Indeed, because much of the flexibility of
the Internet is a consequence of its dependence on software running in
devices at the edge of the network, rather than in systems embedded in the
net, virtually anyone is free to invent new applications and to put them up
for use. The World Wide Web, which entered the Internet picture around 1992,
though it was invented a few years earlier, provided a gigantic opportunity
for virtually anyone to share information with everyone else on the
Internet.
These aspects of the Internet have stimulated considerable attention,
especially in the government sector in recent years. Moreover, as the
Internet becomes increasingly accessible around the world, its applications
and uses begin to reflect the interests of the general population. Where
computers and computer-based systems go, networking is not far behind. This
is especially so as wireless technologies make it less and less expensive to
provide connectivity for voice communications (mobiles) and for data
communication ("hot spots" using wireless local area networks).
In a sense, ICANN has become the only globally visible body charged with any
kind of oversight for the Internet. The scope of this oversight
responsibility was deliberately and intentionally limited in the process of
the creation of ICANN. But as the Internet continues to grow, as domain
names become increasingly visible in the context of the World Wide Web, and
as the so-called "dot.com" bubble expanded between 1998 and early 2000 and
then burst, many people with concerns or complaints about problems
associated with the Internet or use uses (and abuses) have turned to ICANN
expecting it to address many of these issues.
Not surprisingly, ICANN's intentionally limited mandate and limited
resources, did not outfit it with the ability to deal with such complaints
as spam (unsolicited commercial electronic mail), fraud, theft, pornography,
and the long list of other abuses that creative human beings have invented
for the Internet. Though intense discussions about Internet policy (or
"governance") frequently reference ICANN, it has become apparent that the
topic of governance is far more expansive than the limited role ICANN plays
in the operation of the Internet. These responsibilities of ICANN are often
carried out through the cooperative efforts of other groups such as the
system of voluntary root servers and the work of the Regional Internet
address Registries (RIRs), and domain name registries and registrars around
the world. While these functions appear on the surface to be quite
straightforward, they have policy ramifications that make them more complex.
Who should be assigned the responsibility for operating a top level domain
name service? Which addresses should be placed in the root zone file? Who
should be allowed to register any particular domain name in a top level
domain? Are there any restrictions on registrations? How can character sets
other than simple Latin characters be introduced into domain names? Where
should the root servers be located? What should be the policy for allocation
and assignment of Internet address space? How should that policy be
developed? It is because these questions are not simple that ICANN has
formed a rich system of supporting organizations and forums in which to air
such policy issues and seek to develop consensus around them.
In the course of the WSIS discussions, the full breadth of the term
"Internet Governance" was sometimes confused with the narrower scope of
ICANN responsibility. During the next phase of WSIS, culminating in late
2005 in Tunisia, it is vital that the discussion takes into account that the
range of Internet governance questions requires a much broader system of
practices, agreements and policies than are encompassed in ICANN's mandate.
Nor does it seem appropriate to seek to expand that mandate to accommodate
areas that should be the province of domestic and international governmental
concern. The participants in the WSIS and associated WGIG discussions have a
significant task ahead of them. Dealing with the many public policy
interests arising from the rapid growth of Internet requires that many of
the issues lying outside ICANN's responsibility find venues in which they
can be addressed. Intellectual property protection concerns might be
addressed in the World Intellectual Property Organization and perhaps the
World Trade Organization. Concerns for criminal use of the Internet may be
taken up in organizations such as Interpol among others. Many of the
concerns may be addressed domestically but because of its global nature and
relative insensitivity to national boundaries, resolving these issues may
require cooperation among governments or non-governmental but international
organizations for their solution.
There is a vast range of policy issues concerning which ICANN has no
charter. To facilitate the use of the Internet for global electronic
commerce, it would be beneficial to develop international procedures for the
use of digital signatures, mechanisms to resolve disputes associated with
international electronic transactions, treatment of various transaction
taxes in an international setting and the protection of intellectual
property held in digital formats and distributed globally through the
Internet medium. These are not new problems; rather, they are old problems
emerging in a new medium.
It has been suggested by some participants in the WSIS discussions that the
role of ICANN might be undertaken by the traditional International
Telecommunications Union (ITU). While the ITU has served the world as the
international forum for the handling of many international issues associated
with traditional tele-communications, the Internet has disrupted the neat
categorization of various telecommunications media. It is the potential
bearer of every form of communication. ICANN has evolved international
processes and structures over the last six years to cope with a limited set
of issues associated with this rich, complex and rapidly evolving
infrastructure. The world needs an effective and well-supported ICANN but
the participants in the World Summit on the Information Society and the
Working Group on Internet Governance now need to turn their attention to the
full panoply of public policy issues that, as discussed above, lie outside
the mandate of ICANN. These need a thorough and open airing in this next
phase of the World Summit on the Information Society.
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