Seeing Beyond Borders as Domain Names Go Global
The annual convention of the Internet Society held in Geneva was perhaps the most internationally diverse meeting I have ever attended. The 1,500 participants represented nearly every country in the world. The growing international character of the Internet is inspiring, but it has also produced some controversy and debate because of the dominant role the U.S. has played in the development of the global network of networks.
Some new international forms of Internet “governance” were discussed last month in Geneva, focusing mostly on reforming the way Internet “domain names” are created and registered. The international bodies being developed to manage the exploding Internet could be harbingers of a new model of politics that might challenge our current concepts of national sovereignty.
Domain names are an essential part of the Internet. They are the strings of text that come at the end of an Internet e-mail or Web address, such as “latimes.com.”
In simple terms, domain names identify where a particular computer is on the Internet and how it can be found by people who want to send e-mail or find a Web page. Domain name “identity” has become big business--Compaq Computer this month paid $3 million for the right to use the domain name “altavista.com” for its recently acquired Internet search engine of that name.
Right now, Internet users register domain names through a private company, Network Solutions Inc. in Herndon, Va., which has a contract with the National Science Foundation to manage this function.
NSI in turn works with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, or IANA (https://www.iana.org/), which is at USC’s Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey. IANA, headed by Jon Postel, has for many years managed how domain names are attached to the 32-bit numbers that are the true “address space” of computers on the Internet.
It is often said that no one runs the Internet. But Postel comes closer than anyone else. It is the invaluable work of his organization that essentially determines how big the Internet is, how many computers can be part of it and how those computers can be found by users.
This arrangement, however, has come under criticism for several reasons. First, other countries have complained that the whole structure of Internet management is too U.S.-centric. The U.S. government has also been divesting itself of responsibilities for the Internet since 1993. And some people argued that NSI’s monopoly on domain name registration was anti-competitive and inefficient.
For all these reasons, the White House began exploring a new way of managing Internet domain names and numbers. The process produced a white paper in June (https://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/domainname/6_5_98dns.htm) that outlined a proposal for transferring this function to a new international nonprofit organization. The form this organization will take was the hottest topic of discussion in Geneva last month.
This new venture, which has yet to be named but is referred to now as the “new IANA,” will be chartered in the U.S. but with an international board of directors representing various geographic regions and interest groups. Postel said in Geneva that the only task of this organization will be to manage the address space of the Internet. It will not, for example, attempt to resolve trademark disputes attached to conflicting domain name claims.
Ira Magaziner, special assistant to President Clinton on Internet matters, said in Geneva, “We think that model is the right model: nonprofit, independent, decentralized, transparent, international, stakeholder-based and focused on a limited set of tasks.”
This plan struck not only me but others at the Internet Society convention as historically and significantly different from other models of international cooperation that surrounded us in Geneva, such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Labor Organization and the International Telecommunications Union. It seemed portentous that a new form of international cooperation and global governance was being born in a city that hosts these other organizations, all of them products of negotiations between national governments.
The new IANA, however, unlike the U.N. or the WTO, will have no formal role for national governments. This means, as Magaziner said, that the future of the Internet will be in the hands of “stakeholders,” although who qualifies as a stakeholder is not at all clear. Several speakers in Geneva noted that more than half the world’s population has never made a phone call. Are they stakeholders in the future of the Internet? If so, who will represent them?
Professor Saskia Sassen of the University of Chicago, who studies the effect of the Internet on national sovereignty, says: “I don’t think you can reduce the Internet to its technical conditions. If you look at the Internet as at least being partially embedded in other systems--systems of power--things get messy.”
One example came up immediately in Geneva. A member of the audience asked whether regions where there are movements to establish independent nations--such as Scotland, East Timor or Palestine--would be allocated “country codes” in domain names. And if not, why not, and who would decide?
The various Internet technical committees that currently determine how the Internet will develop are justly proud of their efficiency, their technical competence and their independence from chronic political stalemates. It is common to hear how much better this process is than what transpires at the U.N. or in the U.S. Congress.
As such, some people point to these committees as a model for the global “coordination” of free markets, a new paradigm for the 21st century, a successor model to the U.N. and perhaps even the nation-state. “What we’re seeing,” says Sassen, “is a deconstruction of the national state.”
As the Internet becomes more and more international and more and more embedded in everyday life and the worldwide economy, “messy” issues of politics will creep into the technical management of the Internet itself. And then we’ll be forced to ask whether this new model of international cooperation really represents the long-range interests of the world’s population, or whether it’s a well-intentioned but nevertheless troubling transfer of power and authority to a small, elite, global class of technocrats.
Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin. His e-mail address is gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu.
