Does the Internet Need to be Governed?

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Does the Internet Need to be Governed?
By: Vinton Cerf
 From CircleID Internet Governance
November 04, 2004
<http://www.circleid.com/article/795_0_1_0_C/>

In its earlier years, the Internet was simply a tool for the research and 
education community to explore new ways of sharing computing power, 
software, and information by way of electronic mail (which became a popular 
application around 1971 on one of the Internet's predecessors, the 
ARPANET). The approximately one billion users of the Internet today have 
the same range of interests as the general population in most countries. 
The side-effect of this wide spread use is that abuses have arisen that are 
not unlike the kinds of abuses one finds in other societal settings. Fraud, 
misinformation, harassment, illegal transactions, theft of resources, 
breaking and entering (hacking into computers), copyright infringement, and 
many other exact or approximate electronic analogs of improper behavior can 
be found on the Internet. Such problems plainly raise public policy 
concerns among governments and stimulated much interest during the many 
talks associated with the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

  The term "Internet Governance" has become an area of particular attention 
in part as a consequence of widespread recognition that the Internet 
represents an important area of national interest for all countries seeking 
to participate in the benefits of global electronic commerce, distance 
learning, access to the encyclopedic wealth of information on the Internet, 
and in the social dimension that the Internet is creating. From the 
perspective of governments, the Internet is simultaneously a technology 
that promises high economic value for parties making use of it and a 
challenge in that it is unlike all other telecommunications media 
previously invented.

  While traditional telephony, broadcast radio and television and cable 
television, as well as satellite communication have tended to evolve in a 
regulated setting, the Internet has been a "grass-roots" phenomenon, 
operating essentially above the traditional regulated environment. Internet 
runs on top of the telephone network, or its underlying dedicated 
circuitry. It works on broadcast and point-to-point radio, point-to-point 
satellite, optical transmission links and virtually any other 
communications medium. It was designed to work that way. As a consequence, 
it has had the advantage of rapid innovation by users at the "edge" of the 
network, largely without much or any regulatory interference. Indeed, 
because much of the flexibility of the Internet is a consequence of its 
dependence on software running in devices at the edge of the network, 
rather than in systems embedded in the net, virtually anyone is free to 
invent new applications and to put them up for use. The World Wide Web, 
which entered the Internet picture around 1992, though it was invented a 
few years earlier, provided a gigantic opportunity for virtually anyone to 
share information with everyone else on the Internet.

  These aspects of the Internet have stimulated considerable attention, 
especially in the government sector in recent years. Moreover, as the 
Internet becomes increasingly accessible around the world, its applications 
and uses begin to reflect the interests of the general population. Where 
computers and computer-based systems go, networking is not far behind. This 
is especially so as wireless technologies make it less and less expensive 
to provide connectivity for voice communications (mobiles) and for data 
communication ("hot spots" using wireless local area networks).

  In a sense, ICANN has become the only globally visible body charged with 
any kind of oversight for the Internet. The scope of this oversight 
responsibility was deliberately and intentionally limited in the process of 
the creation of ICANN. But as the Internet continues to grow, as domain 
names become increasingly visible in the context of the World Wide Web, and 
as the so-called "dot.com" bubble expanded between 1998 and early 2000 and 
then burst, many people with concerns or complaints about problems 
associated with the Internet or use uses (and abuses) have turned to ICANN 
expecting it to address many of these issues.

  Not surprisingly, ICANN's intentionally limited mandate and limited 
resources, did not outfit it with the ability to deal with such complaints 
as spam (unsolicited commercial electronic mail), fraud, theft, 
pornography, and the long list of other abuses that creative human beings 
have invented for the Internet. Though intense discussions about Internet 
policy (or "governance") frequently reference ICANN, it has become apparent 
that the topic of governance is far more expansive than the limited role 
ICANN plays in the operation of the Internet. These responsibilities of 
ICANN are often carried out through the cooperative efforts of other groups 
such as the system of voluntary root servers and the work of the Regional 
Internet address Registries (RIRs), and domain name registries and 
registrars around the world. While these functions appear on the surface to 
be quite straightforward, they have policy ramifications that make them 
more complex. Who should be assigned the responsibility for operating a top 
level domain name service? Which addresses should be placed in the root 
zone file? Who should be allowed to register any particular domain name in 
a top level domain? Are there any restrictions on registrations? How can 
character sets other than simple Latin characters be introduced into domain 
names? Where should the root servers be located? What should be the policy 
for allocation and assignment of Internet address space? How should that 
policy be developed? It is because these questions are not simple that 
ICANN has formed a rich system of supporting organizations and forums in 
which to air such policy issues and seek to develop consensus around them.

  In the course of the WSIS discussions, the full breadth of the term 
"Internet Governance" was sometimes confused with the narrower scope of 
ICANN responsibility. During the next phase of WSIS, culminating in late 
2005 in Tunisia, it is vital that the discussion takes into account that 
the range of Internet governance questions requires a much broader system 
of practices, agreements and policies than are encompassed in ICANN's 
mandate. Nor does it seem appropriate to seek to expand that mandate to 
accommodate areas that should be the province of domestic and international 
governmental concern. The participants in the WSIS and associated WGIG 
discussions have a significant task ahead of them. Dealing with the many 
public policy interests arising from the rapid growth of Internet requires 
that many of the issues lying outside ICANN's responsibility find venues in 
which they can be addressed. Intellectual property protection concerns 
might be addressed in the World Intellectual Property Organization and 
perhaps the World Trade Organization. Concerns for criminal use of the 
Internet may be taken up in organizations such as Interpol among others. 
Many of the concerns may be addressed domestically but because of its 
global nature and relative insensitivity to national boundaries, resolving 
these issues may require cooperation among governments or non-governmental 
but international organizations for their solution.

[snip]


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