Whose Internet Is It, Anyway?
May 31 2009 by 
Cricket Liu (Infoblox)
Ariel Rabkin (of my alma mater, Berkeley) wrote an interesting, thoughtful article on Internet governance recently. It argues that U.S. government control of the root zone, through the Department of Commerce's oversight of IANA, perhaps isn't such a bad thing. The U.S., after all, has done a good job so far, eliciting few complaints. The First Amendment helps us resist calls to use such control as a bludgeon in the service of censorship. An international organization might yield to covert pressure to enact restrictions on content.
While Mr. Rabkin's arguments appeal to me, I wonder how much my view is clouded by being an American. Furthermore, I tend to think that some of his points would have rung hollow just months ago, before the current administration took office.
On the other hand, I've thought about alternatives to the current governance model before and never come up with one I felt sure would work better. Is the current arrangement "the worst form except for all those others that have been tried"?
Posted in Governance | 
1 comments
Jun 3, 2009 at 5:17 PM
Rabkin's argument does ring hollow. Congress has often made it, implying that free speech principles would be threatened if the Commerce Dept “abandoned” its special oversight role “now or in the near future.”
Tellingly, Commerce has since 1997 repeatedly refused to incorporate freedom of expression as a principle guiding the ICANN regime, despite numerous calls for it to do so in public comment sessions.
Commerce has urged ICANN to do many things – protect trademarks, override privacy concerns to provide open access to domain name registrants’ personal identification data, and promote competition – but it has never once urged it to respect, or even pay attention to, freedom of expression.
http://blog.internetgovernance.org/blog/_archives/2008/5/11/3685901.html
Re: future arrangements. We'll be filing comments this week with Commerce and posting them to our website, including ideas to allow an accountable ICANN to perform its narrow DNS coordinating function while limiting interference or abuse by governments. Would greatly appreciate any feedback.