Post Tagged with: "internet governance"

ICANN Faces Pressure From Friends and Foes

My latest Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, BBC version, homepage version) highlights the growing frustration with ICANN’s accountability and transparency. The column highlights the many policy issues associated with Internet governance and notes that over the past month even ICANN’s most ardent supporters have begun to express doubts about the organization' s lack of transparency and accountability. 

Read more ›

April 4, 2006 Comments are Disabled Columns

The Credible Threat

If you have been following the debate over Internet governance over the past few years, you know that while ICANN supporters (U.S., Canadian, Australian governments; business lobby) and critics (developing world and occasionally Europe) argue over the optimal approach, particularly with respect to government involvement in the domain name system, the reality has been that possession is all.  The U.S. government retains ultimate control over the system and thus the debate is somewhat academic.  In assessing the outcome at the World Summit on the Information Society last fall, I argued that:

"the U.S. simply had a very strong hand and played it well.  Changes to the governance structure ultimately requires U.S. agreement since possession is even more than the proverbial 9/10th of the law.  The U.S. had loudly indicated that it was not prepared to make concessions.  During the negotiations at the PrepCom it adopted a very hard line – even raising the prospect of pulling back on ccTLD sovereignty or turning over the Internet Governance Forum to a private sector group like ISOC.  Without a credible threat (the threat being the creation of alternate root), the U.S. was able to maintain its position and ultimately force everyone else to deal."

The alternate root has always lurked in the background as a possibility that would force everyone to rethink their positions since it would enable a single country (or group of countries) to effectively pack up their bags and start a new game.  The U.S. control would accordingly prove illusory since a new domain name system situated elsewhere would be subject to its own rules.  While the two could theoretically co-exist by having ISPs simply recognize both roots, the system could "break" if both roots contained identical extensions.  In other words, one root can have dot-com and other other can have dot-corp, but they can’t both have dot-com.

It is with that background in mind that people need to think about a press release issued yesterday in China announcing a revamping of its Internet domain name system.  Starting tomorrow, China’s Ministry of Information Industry plans to begin offering four country-code domains.  In addition to the dot-cn country code domain, three new Chinese character domains are on the way: dot-China, dot-net, and dot-com.  As the People’s Daily Online notes this "means Internet users don’t have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of the United States."

Read more ›

February 28, 2006 5 comments News

Net Governance Deal May Not End Debate

The BBC features my op-ed column (BBC version, website version) focusing on this week’s WSIS Internet governance agreement. Much like yesterday’s blog posting, I argue that the outcome reflects the bargaining position of the United States and the European Union, but that the deal may not be as lopsided as […]

Read more ›

November 16, 2005 Comments are Disabled Columns

The WSIS Deal

There is considerable coverage this morning (or this evening in Tunis) on the last minute WSIS deal struck yesterday.  The gist of the coverage rightly reports that the U.S. emerged with the compromise they were looking for as the delegates agreed to retain ICANN and the ultimate U.S. control that […]

Read more ›

November 16, 2005 1 comment News

Facing the Facts on Internet Governance

Having just arrived in Tunis for the WSIS, my weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, freely available version) focuses on the Internet governance issues that are likely to dominate discussions all week.  I argue that claims about a "digital Munich" and a U.N. takeover are not helpful to arriving […]

Read more ›

November 14, 2005 4 comments Columns