Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. Winston Churchill, House of Commons speech, 11 November 1947
The current Internet governance system may be messy, but it is better than any other alternative we can devise at present. Ismail Serageldin, Internet ICANN Strategy Panel, 30 January 2014
The phenomenal success of the Internet has prompted a number of voices to question how it is governed, and who makes the decisions and who benefits. Some see the US government pulling the strings behind a system that remains mostly dominated by American firms and whose most important installations have largely remained on US soil. Politics entered the argument, many simply saying that in this day and age of globalisation and multilateralism, and the relatively reduced economic power of the US in the global economy, others must have an equal say in how the Internet is run. The governance debate was on. It became a part of the central debates launched at the World Summit for the Information Society (WSIS) held in 2003 in Geneva and in 2005 in Tunis. An Internet Governance Forum (IGF) ensued, meeting yearly in different parts of the world. Further fuelled by political controversies surrounding the US National Security Agency and US government snooping, the increasing invasion of privacy that is part of the rapidly changing contexts created by social media and even commercial services being provided through the Internet, more voices were raised demanding to break up the US monopoly on running the Internet. As we approach the 10-year mark for IGF 2015, a number of committees and panels have been convened to reflect on the substance of the issues and produce recommendations on the topic of how the Internet should be governed. This small note is one contribution to one of these distinguished panels, devoted to the future role of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
THE UNBELIEVABLE SUCCESS OF THE INTERNET: The Internet has been one of the most transformative inventions in human history. There is hardly any aspect of our lives that has not been touched and transformed by the Internet, from communications, to commerce, to science, to social networking, to making all the worlds information available at everyones fingertips. As the locus of interaction with the Internet shifts from desktop PCs to personalised hand-held devices, the magic of an ever-present service that makes all that possible is taken for granted by billions of human beings.
Yet, it is a unique achievement in terms of engineering and management. In engineering terms, with the possible exception of the mobile phone, there is no other case of an engineering design having been robust enough and flexible enough to be able to handle an expansion in scale of operations of more than one million fold. The Internet design, the TCP/IP system, has proved capable of handling a million times more machines, to manage a volume of information transfer that is more than a million times larger and at speeds faster than the original design handled. All those billions of machines and devices that make this possible have addresses unique to their point of attachment to the Internet, and the system allows anyone anywhere to be connected and to receive audio and visual information at the speed of light!
The fact that a largely self-appointed group of people have actually managed to create and launch this unique system and to guide it through its explosive growth may be almost unbelievable. But it did happen, and the Internet worked and still works, and is today among the most reliable means of communication we have.
Thus it behooves us to ask: 1) what are the key features of the Internet that we want to preserve, those features that serve humanity so well and that almost all of us are unwilling to see compromised; 2) how the current system has been able to guarantee them; and 3) to measure the desirability or appropriateness of any suggested change in the governance system against the extent to which it would protect current achievements or improve the efficiency of the operation without endangering this or that feature we value.
DESIRABLE FEATURES OF THE INTERNET SYSTEM: The Internets amazing performance is due to several key features, most notable among these is its unitary structure and the designed net neutrality, i.e. it is open to all traffic from anywhere to anywhere and will allow all types of information and content to be so transferred or accessed, sent to storage devices or retrieved there from.
That this was achieved largely from a base physically in the US is an accident of history that has not impeded fair development of the Internet involving many international partners or the provision of its services to one and all. Thus, while the initial project began with the ARPANET in 1968, the Internet project quickly involved non-US partners as early at 1972 when the International Network Working Group (INWG) was created and when a number of non-US research teams cooperated to implement the experimental TCP/IP protocols of the Internet. Notably, there were participants from Japan, Norway, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Germany who were formally part of the programme while others participated in research in parallel with or through the INWG. Indeed the World Wide Web was developed in CERN in Switzerland and has rapidly become a fundamental component of the Internet and is administered by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which works with other parts of the governance of the Internet system through its multiple layers to preserve and protect the desirable features of the Internet system as billions of people have come to know it and to rely on it. All this may be imperfect, but it works well.
That the Internet has scaled up so incredibly despite its brief existence has inevitably meant that the system has confronted the frictions and tensions that come from increasing complexity. Many actors from all over the world are today involved in making the Internet work, and accommodating them all while ensuring the continuing effective management of the service has been a challenge. That challenge has been met by expanding the realm of the internet (e.g. the move to IPv6 expansion of the Top Level Domain space) and by systematically involving as many of the relevant stakeholders as possible in as transparent a way as possible in the decision-making that accompanied the huge expansion of the Internet.
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