Internet Politics
Jay Leno used to make fun of the fact that Al Gore had allegedly claimed to have invented the internet during his election campaign against GWB. I laughed at this and thought what a fool, but I didn’t know who actually invented it, and looked around sheepishly hoping nobody would notice. I had a hunch that Billy G (Bill Gates’ gangster name, I think everyone should have a gangster name) had something to do with it but it doesn’t look like it. This morning I was browsing (scrolling) through the economist and found out that there is somebody who “invented it”, a dude called Jon Postel (apparently techies refer to him as God, those damn atheists). He apparently coordinated the network’s underlying protocols and addressing system (whatever that means) between 1968 and 1998. Talk about responsibility. And I had no clue the internet is so old! I thought it came about in the late ’80s. Anyway all this was paid for by the US dept of defence, but the US government maintained a pretty much hands off role. Since ‘98 the job has been done by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a private US firm that the US govt keeps an eye on but doesn’t do much else.
I still know sod all about the Net, I just use it, and until there’s some problem that can’t be fixed by restarting my comp I probably wouldn’t care too much. But it’s rather surprising and quite undemocratic that this whole system is coordinated by one private firm. And the fact that it is a US firm makes me go ooh you hegemonic bastards. Of late there have been some rumblings by other countries, China in particular. The fact that the majority of the world’s internet users do not claim English to be their mother tongue makes it a bit unfair that web addresses and stuff are only in English (correct me if i’m wrong). As a result countries have called for the internet to be coordinated by an international intergovernmental body with more government oversight, to make the system more internationally friendly and democratic. Two days ago China moved ahead and with three new internet-address suffixes in the Chinese language, as national variants to .cn, .com and .net. So Chinese ppl can now use Chinese characters for website and e-mail addresses. It’s likely that a bunch of others will follow suit, and this will make the internet more democratic and could reach out to more ppl. A good thing.
But, there are complications, this democracy comes at a price. Apparently the move by the Chinese (symbolic as they are) could potentially undermine the possibility of every computer to communicate directly with another computer, a bad thing. There would also be a requirement for several separate naming systems, duplication of effort, a bad thing, a clear case of natural monopoly maybe. So one naming system would be the best way to go about it, but which language should be used? English seems to be the obvious choice, but that’s easy for me to say bc I speak English. Since the current system uses English, continuing on this path is the rational, practical choice, however undemocratic it maybe.
But what of the coordination of the internet? The system, as far as i know, has worked ok so far, so why change? It’s a political thing really, it’s all about the distribution of power. Big international egos are at stake. The fears of ICANN getting a megalomaniac as a CEO are i’m sure secondary. The costs of having an international, inter-governmentally run coordinating body are simply the costs faced by any non-private body, bureaucracy, lack of innovation and increased costs. So it probably wouldn’t be worth it. Certainly not in the name of international egos. Democracy is a good thing, but sometimes practicality trumps the calls of democracy. I think the status quo should remain in place, it maybe undemocratic but it’s the most practical and efficient system, and that works well for all of us, at least that’s democratic.
i don’t know much about the net either *embarassed* which should be my gangster name? *thinks*
Comment by Roshi — March 3, 2006 @ 3:07 pm
China denies creating new TLDs.
Also, I don’t understand why you’d think that this move could “potentially undermine the possibility for every computer to communicate with another computer”.
The DNS system simply maps a name (ie: blogsome.com) to an IP address. Alternatives to DNS have cropped up from time to time (Google for “Realnames”). If people don’t like the new scheme, they’ll just find another DNS server to get their domains resolved into IP addresses.
Also, the “democratic” alternative to ICANN appears to be the UN. Not entirely sure if that would work out better than the existing setup.
Comment by drac — March 3, 2006 @ 4:09 pm
Drac - Heh as i said, i know little about techno stuff so was relying on The Economist to fill me in on that side. So can’t really respond to what you say about DNS stuff. I figured that computers like humans would not be able to communicate across two different languages (without a translator). But what do i know
Alternative to ICANN isn’t necessarily the UN, but some international body, but I’d guess it would run into the same bureaucratic, diplomatic issues the UN seems to struggle with. As I said, the status quo is the best bet at the moment.
Maybe this from The Economist clears things up with regard to China’s denial; “The new Chinese addresses are still designed to function through the ICANN-sanctioned system, according to a senior Chinese engineer familiar with the initiative. And underneath the names the system continues to use numerical internet-protocol addresses doled out by ICANN. Moreover, the Chinese addresses are considered “temporarily set” in place; designed in other words, to rattle a sabre at ICANN (and America), not spear it in the belly—for the time being.” - which was what I meant by “The move of the Chinese (symbolic as they are)..”
Comment by ddm — March 3, 2006 @ 4:42 pm
I liked this post. Don’t necessarily agree with everything you said, though.
There are good reasons why the web is run by the private sector as opposed to being run by a democratic international agency of some sort.
And those are the issues of control, policing and censorship. If the web was run by a group who was accountable to the people, then sure, child porn pervs would be able to be tracked down and caught etc, but censorship and laws would come into play on the web.
At present the web is a place to freely trade information anonymously - people can say pretty much what they want and do what they want with their data.
Regulate it, and you can say goodbye to things like viruses and spam, but also to things like piracy, privacy (the regulator will want to make sure it knows who all users are eventually), and (dare I say it) pornography.
Some will disagree with me, but I think the internet would be very crap if it was regulated. The internet is cool because you decide how to use it - not some faceless high-up body that makes your decisions for you, and sets what you can see and do.
However, ICANN could and should be run more transparently. That much I agree with.
Cool post, I love your blog.
Best wishes
Yo
Comment by Yo — March 3, 2006 @ 5:16 pm
Yo - Thanks
I agree with you on most points, there are pros and cons of regulating the net but the cons would outweigh the pros.
Comment by ddm — March 3, 2006 @ 7:48 pm
ddm: let me explain DNS with an analogy. People here (mostly) know of you as “ddm”. Some others may refer to you by your first name. Yet others may refer to you by your surname (but may not necessarily be aware of your first name). Ultimately, all those names “resolve” to the same person - you.
ICANN is the authority in charge of making sure that there aren’t two sites claiming to be named “ddm” - because unlike with humans, domain names _must_ be unique.
What the Chinese authorities seem to propose is a replacement for .com, .cn (written in Roman characters) with the Chinese character equivalents. The advantage is that their citizens need not remember a sequence of unfamiliar Roman chars to visit a website. The disadvantage is that anyone from outside China (or without the capability to type in Chinese characters) can no longer access that site by its domain name.
The issue is not so much language as much as it is character set dependent. Having domain names in Sinhala, for example, would be cool.. but what about people who want to visit from other places? They wouldn’t have an easy way to type out the domain name (because it is stored as Sinhala characters).
To revisit the names analogy, there is no problem with having two different names for the same site. So, for example, Gmail.com could also be called Googlemail.com and still point to the same site
Similarly, the Chinese can run their own DNS servers, use their own names, but as long as they also stick with the ICANN sanctioned domain names, nothing is going to go terribly wrong. Heck, I could run my own DNS servers and make up my own hierarchy of domain names whenever I pleased - it’s perfectly “legal”.
Of course, I personally think that supporting lots of funky charsets in domain names is more a headache than anything else… paypal.com is not the same as päypal.com [with a umlaut] and criminals take advantage of that to mislead people.
yo: there is a difference between regulating the mechanisms which run the infrastructure of the internet and regulating the content on the internet
One form of regulation is good, the other not quite so much.
Comment by drac — March 3, 2006 @ 7:51 pm
agree with most of what everyone has said.
problem with u.n. or any other such intergovernmental body is that it will be democratic in a very narrow sense only. most constituent governments will not be democratic. would chinese government really speak for the chinese users? at present it actively censors the net or at least try to.
i think present set up is more democratic, though imperfect, since it takes in to account various interest groups that actually have a stake in it.
Comment by sittingnut — March 3, 2006 @ 10:14 pm
drac - That was an excellent explanation! I think it was the movie road trip where someone said that you can teach anything to anybody as long as you can find something that they can relate to. Good stuff
Comment by ddm — March 3, 2006 @ 10:32 pm
I’m hurt, my attempts at explaining it to you were in vain then
Comment by Curious Yellow — March 4, 2006 @ 1:23 am
Drac - I accept that there is a distinction between the two. You’re totally right.
But my feeling is that the formation of a body (that is democratically elected) to run the infrastructure of the internet would sooner or later be pressured by lobby groups to somehow regulate content. At the moment nobody has any jurisdiction over content, but the creation of a publicly-accountable mechanism to regulate infrastructure would (to me) inevitably lead to calls for a publicly-accountable body to regulate content and perhaps additional bodies to police and prosecute offenders.
Democracy is not, as many people may think, always the best way to do things. It rewards what is popular and not what is right, and can also be manipulated by financial donors.
Comment by Yo — March 4, 2006 @ 2:18 am