2nd Week Routing it right

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Internet governance

Routing it right

The survival of the internet’s governing body has come at a price

Dec 2nd 2010 | from PRINT EDITION

PETER DENGATE THRUSH knows a lot about names. A scientist by training, he has much respect for Carl Linnaeus, the 18th-century classifier of plants and animals. But these days Mr Thrush is busy looking after a different taxonomy: internet addresses, or more precisely their suffixes such as “.com” or “.net”. He chairs the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the closest thing the web has to a governing body. New addresses are more than names, he explains, they are creations.

ICANN is set to create many new such digital beasts. When the organisation meets for its triannual shindig between December 5th and 10th in Cartagena, Colombia, its board intends to finalise plans to introduce many more “top-level domains”, as these suffixes are called. This follows the worldwide introduction of internet addresses with non-roman characters earlier this year. If the new plans go ahead, ICANN can argue that it has accomplished its main mission: making the domain-name system (DNS) more competitive and international. For an organisation that seemed doomed from the day it was founded in 1998 because of squabbles over its legitimacy, that is quite a feat.

To grasp why all this matters, imagine an internet not with one, but several competing address systems: different websites, for instance, could have the same address; and e-mails could get lost. Forestalling such confusion—and thus making sure that the internet remains a universal network—is ICANN’s main job. It oversees the DNS, essentially an address book that maps website names to the long numbers (“IP addresses”) that identify computers on the network. After somebody types, say, www.economist.cominto a browser, the DNS reveals the IP address of the computers that host The Economist’s website.

Life would be much easier for ICANN if it had only to keep this system running. But since there can be just one such address book, the organisation has become the focal point of all kinds of interests. Registering domain names has become a big business; hundreds of firms offer such services. Trademark holders want to be able to defend their brands online. And governments want a say over what internet addresses can be used. In August, for instance, ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee sent a letter to the organisation’s board requesting a way to flag domains that could “raise national, cultural, geographic, religious and/or linguistic sensitivities or objections.” So much, then, for “.uighur” and “.muhammad”.

ICANN’s tricky birth has not helped either. It had to be created from scratch—under unfavourable circumstances. After the late 1960s the DNS was essentially run by one man: Jon Postel, an American engineer, whom techies called “God”. Yet this form of governance became harder to justify as the internet became more commercial. In 1998 America’s Department of Commerce created ICANN, a non-profit corporation to be headed by Mr Postel, to run the DNS, but he died soon after.

If the group has found its footing, despite many crises in the ensuing years, it is mainly for two reasons. One is that those toying with the idea of starting their own DNS have realised that they would be worse off. A few years ago, China and Russia left ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee, protesting that the body was too American and failed to defer to national interests. Last year both returned.

More important, ICANN has adapted, albeit slowly. For much of its life, it was ultimately controlled by the American government. This made sense, given the internet’s history and the fact that most users were American. But as the number of netizens in other countries and particularly in China has grown, the set-up became outdated. Successive reforms have pushed the organisation farther away from direct American control, granting more power to other countries.

What is more, ICANN has slowly widened the internet’s name space (see chart). It first introduced a dozen new top-level domains, such as “.info” and “.biz”. After much foot-dragging, it earlier this year allowed web addresses in Arabic, Chinese and Cyrillic and plans to do the same with nine other non-roman scripts. And now it intends to accept new top-level domain names at a clip of up to 1,000 annually.

But giving governments more power has come at a price. For now, websites can purchase addresses in local languages only from national governments. For a site with the word “Tiananmen” in Chinese, one needs to get approval from authorities in China, Taiwan, Singapore or Hong Kong. For “Chechnya” in Cyrillic, check with the Kremlin. Rebecca MacKinnon, a fellow at the New America Foundation and an expert on China’s internet, reports that Chinese bloggers are already wary of buying domains through China’s state-controlled registrar because they fear censorship.

Some also think that ICANN’s board still lacks accountability. It is selected by a nominating committee, which is in turn made up of representatives from trade and regional groups. It takes its decisions regardless of what consensus the extensive process for public comment has produced. And Lauren Weinstein, a longtime ICANN critic, says that the plan to introduce thousands of new top-level domains is nothing but a “protection racket” by the “domain-industrial complex”, because firms need to buy addresses for their brands in every new domain. And launching new suffixes will not come cheap. The organisation intends to charge $185,000 a time, which could more than treble its budget.

But for those who have grown tired of such disputes, there is hope. Web addresses should increasingly fade from public view. More and more people now use domain-name shortening services such as bit.ly and econ.st (The Economist’s such offering). And the naming systems of Facebook and other social networks are becoming more important. Such alternatives may never make ICANN and the DNS obsolete, but they could reduce both to what they ought to be: a mere technicality.

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