Fergus Cassidy

Ruling the root

IT has been referred to as the internet's "Constitution moment". Pioneer Vint Cerf once described it as "a garden of Eden situation".

He was talking about the formation of an organisation to manage and administer the naming and numbering of computers and internet address space. That organisation was Icann and it came to life in 1998.

It was a 'Constitution moment' in the sense that it was the first attempt to establish some sort of technical order for a global network using the domain name system, still in use today. The formation of Icann in 1998, for good or bad, set the net on the crossroads it now finds itself resting at.

The big change, and the one that is largely attributed to the net's massive growth, was the shift to commercialising the net.

The year before Ira Magaziner, of the US Commerce department, said in a speech at Harvard: "The private sector needs to lead, not governments. Governments need to withdraw. In the digital economy, things move too fast, and are too flexible. Governments are, by their very nature, too slow and too inflexible".

It was Magaziner's department which shortly after issued a plan known as The White Paper, which proposed the transfer the running of the domain name system to a private, non-profit corporation.

This was to be done quickly however and at one point Magaziner pulled out a big stick: "The stakeholders of the internet must come to a consensus on its governance before 30 September 1998 or the US government will take over".

There was irrevocable change in the air. The internet was being let out from the halls of academia and research where it had been midwifed and paid for in its entirety by US taxpayers.

Bob Kahn, who wrote the internet protocols along with Cerf, gave this view recently on those days: "The government had a substantial (dominant initially) role in the creation of the internet. This role subsided greatly after the National Science Federation stopped their support for the NSFNet around 1995".

Icann was constituted as a non-profit organisation subject to the laws of the State of California. It was a US organisation in other words. Or at least it was seen as that by many.

Megabytes of conspiracy theories litter the highways and byways of the web, but so far there is no credible evidence that the United States wanted to control and run the internet. Icann has been criticised for trying to dominate the net and for not doing enough to intervene. In reality, all it does is deal with registries and number allocation.

Whatever slant is taken, it's clear now that the minimalist role embarked on by Icann might be crucial. Whether by accident or design will be for history to reveal. Icann was, and still very much is, an experiment.

The first major decision which led to the growth of the net was to remove the US (or any) government from the equation. This opened up new ground because prior to this, global telecommunications was propped up by legislation and regulations. Most telcos were in state hands and many remain so.

For telecommunicatons, this was a new world. One where the private sector was preferred to state or government regulation, believing that the dead hand of bureaucracy would strangle the fledgling internet.

It is still the new world. If anything it gets newer as time goes by. There are no charts to plot a course by. In the words of the Internet Society - a key pivotal standards body - "No one is in charge of the internet and yet everyone is in charge".

And that's the Catch 22 facing delegates to the global summit on the Information Society being held in Geneva later this week. 6000 delegates to be precise, along with more than 50 heads of state.

After months of discussions, this conference seemed to open up the possibility of a second "Constitution moment". Developing nations, lead by China, Syria and Vietnam and including Russia, India, Saudi Arabia and Brazil let it be known that their interests would be better served if the internet was managed by an intergovernmental group, such as the UN.

The South African president Thabo Mbeki also hinted gently on this recently: "We need to discuss the possibility of putting in place a multilateral mechanism for internet governance and the summit is a good place to do it".

I believe he's wrong. Countries looking for global 'internet governance' are mistakenly seeing in the domain name system something that isn't there. Others, though, greatly fear the internet. China, for example, has built a Great Firewall between itself and the wider internet. Vietnam licenses computers and internet connections.

Of course there are genuine fears concerning the internet. That's been there since day one and will continue for the foreseeable future. This is new ground.

The Internet Society said last week that "it is misleading to use the term 'internet governance' when the internet is clearly not a single entity to govern" and sees 'internet coordination' as a more realistic term.

It's a three-stranded view: coordination of internet standards; coordination of availability and assignment of internet resources; and coordination of the policies preventing misuse of the net.

"The successful continued development of the net for the benefit of everyone can be ensured by participation in these proven processes rather than by attempting to create new untested mechanisms that are inappropriate to the unique characteristics of the internet".

Testing times indeed.