The U.S. government has announced it will continue to control the DNS root structure, indefinitely.
Is this how the Internet War starts?
Until today the U.S. position was that it wanted to transition control of the root over to ICANN, a private entity, and several extensions were given.
Earlier this year, ICANN hesitated in extending Verisign's control of the .Net registry, following the SiteFinder scandal, where Verisign redirected "page not found" errors to a site it controlled (and sold ads against). Control was finally given, through 2011, but Verisign's ethical attitudes have not changed. As we noted earlier this week, it is Verisign that is behind the Crazy Frog Scandal.
Some felt that ICANN caved under U.S. government pressure. What you have here is assurance that such pressure will continue to be effective, and on behalf of a very corrupt company. If that is not seen as a provocation by the ITU I will be very surprised.
So how can that result in Internet War?
The problem, as former ICANN board member Karl Auerbach noted to Dave Farber's list today, "the only reason that the NTIA root zone is 'authoritative' is because a lot of people adhere to it voluntarily." Security expert Richard Forno (top) noted, to the same list, that "the timing is weird, coming as it does only a short time before the forthcoming meeting of the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)."
I would assert that the timing is not weird at all. The U.S. government has told the U.N. that it can shove any thoughts of international control over the DNS where the sun don't shine. It has, in effect, thrown down a gauntlet and dared the international community to challenge it.
More after the break.
Auerbach's (right, below) views on this are relatively benign:
1. Somebody at NTIA finally realized the political cost that will ensue if they relinquish final control over the internet.
2. That NTIA still has its head in the sand and still does not recognize that ICANN does nothing to ensure the technical stability of the net.
But the WSIS and ITU could, if it chose, reject this U.S. takeover of the Internet and begin the process of creating an alternative DNS root, which its members would point to. The result would be two DNS roots and, in effect, two Internets.
But if we can have two Internets, MooresLore readers might ask, why not four or eight etc.? Why indeed? China could establish its own DNS and thus simplify its Great Firewall by not having pointers to any site its leaders don't approve of. So could other countries.
We stand on the precipice of a balkanization of the Internet that could mean its utter destruction. No one seems to be taking note of this.
Fortunately you just did.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Larry Kooper on July 1, 2005 11:52 AM writes...
I object to the blame-America-first tone of Mr Blankenhorn's posting. The UN is far from an efficient, clean organization (oil for food scandal anyone?), with its scores of nations run by dictators.
Permalink to Comment2. Nate on July 1, 2005 12:46 PM writes...
Please note, Larry, that just pointing out the shortcomings of UN beaurocracy (a gratuitously easy target) does not constitute a defense of the United States' position. If you object to the criticism of the US's behavior, I would be interested to hear more of your reasoning.
Permalink to Comment3. Larry Kooper on July 1, 2005 01:21 PM writes...
No problem. The US has an enormous national interest (mainly economic, but security as well) in the stable and uninterrupted operation of the internet. The US is committed to free speech and free markets, not just for Americans but globally. By far the best way of ensuring that politicians or those with an axe to grind don't interfere with the net is to leave it under US control. Technically speaking, there's nothing stopping China from setting up its own DNS today. What would stop them would be the world's opprobrium.
Permalink to Comment4. Chris on July 2, 2005 02:15 AM writes...
Larry, with the crew we have in charge in the USA today, are you really certain that 'ensuring that politicians or those with an axe to grind don't interfere' doesn't in fact require giving it to the UN? (It's not like we have no influence over the UN, but it would at least provide a buffer.)
Max C has hit the nail on the head, BTW.
Permalink to Comment5. stephane koch on July 2, 2005 06:23 AM writes...
Dear all, I'm writing from Switzerland (I hope my English will be understandable - sorry about), about the "Internet Governance" I don't think that the UN, the ITU or the ICANN are the right bodies to care of the DNS. Internet really need an independent structure to manage its technical infrastructures. The problem is not to be "against" or "for" the US. One the of the logical raison of that unbalanced situation is the fact the Internet was born in the US... And the other raison is that the Europe was really slow to understand the potential of the Net.
But we have to take into account there is some economic and military factors which will have an influence on what we call today "internet governance or regulation"
Economic: Who can predict that the US will be strong enough to ensure that they will keep going on to lead the world economy in the future ? for instance, in one hand the China is growing fast (as well for the India) and requiring more and more energy and row materials. In an other hand the China and the Japan hold the future of the Dollar in their hands. US is a free market how they will be able to protect their economic assets (let's focus on the Telco and internet content providers - Verio was an good example)?
By the way, It would be interesting to know what are the economic incidences of the volume of the traffic from the "requests" made to the root servers in relations with the geographic localizations - it's an add value in term of incomes for the Telco operators which are carrying those request and benefiting of an increase of the use of their bandwidths ?.
Military: We are aware today that military is making scenarios on DoS attacks and sustainability of the strategic transport infrastructures, but the main concept developed today is about "information superiority" and "information dominance" from the "Joint IO strategy, including JP 3-13, Joint Vision (JV) 2010, JV 2020, and the recently published “IO Roadmap.”6 Joint Publication 3-13 provides doctrinal guidance for joint forces information operations.
As much as I can understand the strategic military and economic needs of the US in term of the necessity to keep control of the Internet infrastructures, but this will not guaranty anything in term of the way the Internet will work in the future (in a worse scenario we might take into consideration that this control could be use as a tool of diplomatic and economic pressures in the future). Then we maybe need to have redundancy of the DNS by continent with spare "master root server" which can be activate in case of need (even if the situation was already improved - in term of security as well - with the installation of the "anycast root server" the number of root servers is about 13 "historic roots" + 34 anycast in 2004 / 23 in the US and 24 in the rest of the world).
I can't answer to those questions I raised, I could be wrong in my perception, but we have at least to thing at it. I remember when I meet John Postel (one of the father of the Net : postel.org he was expected to be the first Director of the ICANN just before he died) in Geneva in 1998, at the INET conference from ISOC. He was presenting himself as a "world citizen" saying that it was an everyday fight. So I don't think that I would have appreciate the coming situation, all the more that he was against any governmental power on the Internet infrastructures.
Few words about my involvement in this ICANN story: I was involved in the WSIS (as chair of the Geneva ISOC Chapter) in the past, but I give up because I'm thinking that Tunisia is not the best example of democracy to host such summit. A second raison was that persons in charge of creating the WGIG (working group on internet governance) take my question with thoughtlessness when I was asking "what will be the WGIG members selection process" and "how they will assess the competences of the potentials members" (of those people who are going to be the one advising on what could be the world internet governance of tomorrow - question asked in Barcelona at the INET 2004 conference).
two sources to help on the aspect of the infowarfare I mentionned above:
http://www.acq.osd.mil/ds/smi/functions.htm
Permalink to Commenthttp://www.iwar.org.uk/