You and Whose Army?

Having not nearly enough to do the UN and the EU have decided that it is time for the internet to move from American to international control. Declan McCullagh has been covering this issue at C-Net for some time.

The Americans are, quite rightly, having none of it. There is a fair bit of commentary rejecting the very idea that the “Oil for Food” tainted UN with its censor loving ways and its motely collection of expression denying states should have anything at all to do with the ‘net. The UN types and the Eurocrats are trying to run the argument that the internet is a “world resource” and therefore should be subject to world control.

Politically this strikes me as an enormously bad idea simply because no nation on earth has a record of commitment to free speech to match the United States. And the net, whatever else it may be, is all about free speech.

However, there is also a real question as to the technical feasibility of the UN/Euro threat to split the net if they don’t get their own way. This is the so-called “nuclear option”.

Beyond the usual levers of diplomatic pressure and public kvetching, Brazil and China could choose what amounts to the nuclear option: a fragmented root. That means a new top-level domain would not be approved by ICANN–but would be recognized and used by large portions of the rest of the world. The downside, of course, is that the nuclear option could create a Balkanized Internet where two computers find different Web sites at the same address.
cnet

at a purely technical level, propose that the UN were to set up its own top level domain. What would prevent ICANN from recognizing that domain. It may not reciprocate but all that would mean is that almost everyone would stick with WWW knowing that because ICANN recognizes the UN domain they would not be missing anything.

I may have this wrong at a tech level but my sense is that unless particular nations were willing to actually filter their citizens net use - which many are already doing - to allow access to only the UN domain, the two systems could co-exist. Of course, virtually no one except the EU and the Chinese government would bother actually using the UN system because, er, there would be nothing on it.

This is one of those dilemmas where the technology is going to determine the political outcome rather than vice versa. And, no matter what is done by the officials, there will be some kid in a basement building a script which will give access to both nets.

Time for the weenies at the UN and the EU to buy a clue and, perhaps, look at ways that they can actually use the net rather than trying to control it.

(Any bets which way Canada will go on the question….)

Written by jay on October 10th, 2005 with 2 comments.
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