Protecting the Net From Private, Political Interests

For most consumers sitting down to use the Web or e-mail, global governance of the Internet is probably the last thing to come to mind. But, increasingly, how the Internet is “governed”--or how it isn’t governed--will shape everyone’s experience of using the Net. And how the world adjusts to this new supranational form of communication and commerce will have far-reaching implications for politics and democracy in general.

This was one of the main topics of a discussion in Los Angeles two weeks ago at a meeting organized by People for Internet Responsibility, a small group of veteran technologists and Internet pioneers. About 25 people discussed the future of the Internet for two days. This was a group with a panoramic view of the Internet’s past--the average attendee had 20 years’ experience using the Internet, and some people had taken part in the network’s earliest developments.

Many of the old Internet hands at the meeting see an intensifying free-for-all over “real estate” on the Internet, which they say is leading to bad public policy decisions, dubious technologies, international friction and a sense that a network once ruled by dedicated and altruistic technicians has been taken over by greedy, reckless and selfish people, governments and businesses.

Barbara Simons, past president of the Assn. for Computing Machinery, the world’s oldest society of computer professionals, pointed out that powerful interests in the copyright-holding industries, such as music recording and film, persuaded Congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998. That law makes it illegal to attempt to circumvent, or to actually circumvent, any method or device used to protect digital information from unauthorized copying. As Simons noted, computer security experts typically advance the state of the art by trying to break into things; now that’s a crime because of DMCA, and those at the conference warned that the nation’s computer systems will be far less secure than they should be as a result of these limitations.

Meanwhile, Simons said, the FBI and the White House constantly beat the drum for increased computer security, recently elevating this rhetoric to something reminiscent of the Cold War era. “This is crazy,” Simons said.

There are similar problems in the way the Internet addressing system is developing, which is producing a Gordian knot of conflicting trademark claims, dilemmas over limited address names and heated controversies over how many variations of .com or .org we should allow.

Critics of the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, which oversees the issuing of Internet addresses, have complained that this organization is the captive of wealthy interests who are determined to protect their individual address names and intellectual property no matter what that does to the rationality or coherence of the addressing system. There’s something unfair and unsatisfying about a system that gives Ford Motor Co. automatic rights to “ford.com,” for example, instead of Ford’s Corner Grocery Store or Ford’s Mortuary.

It’s not always private interests that threaten the Internet. Foreign governments increasingly are meddling in how the network works, what information it conveys and who can use it. France and Germany are trying to keep the Internet free of Nazi-related merchandise and ideas. China is bent on delivering an Internet to its citizens that is nonthreatening to the government.

We’re in a strange conundrum. True global governance of the Internet may be impossible--the Internet probably is beyond governability already.

“Attempts to control the Internet risk breaking it,” said Bob Frankston, one of the inventors of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program for PCs. However, this axiom hasn’t stopped people and institutions from trying to control the Internet. The question is how we can protect the Internet from these people. Through global governance? And thus impose another set of risks? We need a new political theory to break through this logjam.

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Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin.