US control over Internet hotly disputed

By Janna Quitney Anderson
Sunday, 22 November 2009 13:50

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A wide-ranging three-hour session on critical Internet resources at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Sharm El Sheikh this week made clear the continuing points of global friction when it comes to how US involvement Internet control is perceived by its critics.
Now that the JPA is gone and the AoC is in place, there will be special attention paid to the oversight processes of ICANN and a new key critical Internet resources topic will be the operation of the IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

This entity oversees Internet root zone management, global IP address allocation and most Internet Protocol assignments. It is currently operated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers <http://www.icann.org/> . The influence of the United States in setting up the system and its management and continuing involvement is the subject of much dispute. Many people prefer that control over the root system be more internationalized.
 
Several people at IGF questioned the status quo. "I think we should certainly see the Affirmation of Commitments as a major important step forward in Internet governance," said Willie Currie of the Association for Progressive Communications. "And I think it opens up the possibility of a range of actions to be taken in its place. I think one of them is the transfer of responsibility for the IANA contract to ICANN itself. And there's no reason to wait until 2011 for this to take place."
 
Currie said the U.S. has made it clear that it will not hand over the control of the root zone file. "I would submit that policy needs to be reviewed and is a missing element in the Affirmation of Commitments," he said. "If one peruses the transcript of the ICM registry versus ICANN matter before the independent review panel, there seems to be a prima facie evidence that the U.S. government, through the Department of Commerce was willing to try to use leverage - use its control over the root as leverage in the dot XXX decision. This raises important freedom of expression issues."
 
Y.J. Park, a Multistakeholder Advisory Group member and a professor at Delft University of Technology, agreed with Curry. "U.S. government still remains as a sole global authority that approves all delegation and redelegation of the rest of 251 ccTLDs and 21 gTLDs as of today," Park said.
 
"According to IDN fast-track process identified by ICANN, U.S. government is about to exercise its power once again to approve IDN ccTLDs as final authority. Such a practice of delegating sole power to a nation state without global consensus is very unusual in a national community. As one of the academics who studied ccTLDs, my study found that under the supervision of one nation makes it very difficult to have more stable relationship between ICANN and ccTLDs. Therefore, taking advantage of this opportunity, I would like to urge that the next IANA contract between IANA and U.S. government should not repeat what AoC did.
 
"Instead, the next IANA contract should identify an international body that will take over the current role of the U.S. government. Since the IANA contract is to expire in 2011, I would like to remind IGF community here that we, international community, have only more than a year or so to identify the international body. Therefore, I would like to propose the IGF should start to encourage such discussion, who can replace the current supervisor who coordinates the global critical Internet infrastructure."
 
ICANN veteran and Internet Governance Project leader Milton Mueller disagreed that the time is right for this move. "As a member of civil society, we welcome the U.S. government's step away from ICANN, we recognize that the IANA contract is a bigger step," he said. "I'm not sure I see the need to rush that. Recognize that when many people call for internationalizing the IANA contract, they want to participate in the power of the U.S. government rather than eliminating that power. And I'm not sure that's always a good thing. Good that the global public interest is memorialized. It's very good that language about fact-based policy development and thorough and reasoned explanation is in there. We do not think self-reviews by the ICANN community are a substitute for accountability."
 
This session on critical Internet resources started off much earlier in the morning with a discussion of the transition from IPv4 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4>  to IPv6 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6>  - a move needed to establish enough network addresses to meet the needs of the future. One way people in the know explain this is to say that if you think of all of the IPv4 addresses available as being about the size of a golf ball, the number of addresses available under IPv6 is about equivalent to the size of the sun. The transition is being gradually accomplished globally, and has been in progress for many years.
 
Paul Wilson of APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry for the Asia Pacific region, said the process is expected to progress for at least another decade, with IPv4 running in a dual-stack configuration with IPv6. "The trick will be in a couple of years' time," he said, "when we have a drastically reduced number of IPv4 addresses to distribute." One reason for the move to IPv6 was a recognition that IPv4 depletion was approaching.
 
Transition has been slow. "We have only a tiny fraction of 1 percent," Wilson said, "but it's growing at an exponential rate at the moment." Hofmann observed, "What has happened since last year? The answer is not that much." Wilson replied, "A fraction of anything on the Internet is quite substantial. In the next two years we expect there to be a really rapid increase in deployment. There will be enough addresses for everyone - 300 trillion-trillion-trillion addresses. The perception is that this process is slow or it somehow should be faster. It is simply not the case. It is a choice that we will transition in the future when it’s necessary, when we're ready, when we're justified."
 
He said businesses have been waiting to make the switch. "It's an informed, intelligent business decision we see," he said, adding that surveys indicate that most businesses have the transition in their future plans. Raul Echeberria of LACNIC, the Latin American and Caribbean registry, noted that many moves toward implementation of IPv6 are taking place in his region. "The number of people who have been trained on IPv6 is really big - more than 1,000."
 
Migrating to a new technical standard is a challenge. Mueller raised the question of depleting the IPv6 numbers. "Scarcity could exist, and we have to worry now about how we allocate IPv6 addresses," he said. Echeberria agreed, "We have to conserve the resource now," he said.
 
Rod Beckstrom, president and CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, rose to point out - in a pleasant but defensive mode that "the addresses are absolutely available and every country is treated equally." He added, "If anyone in this room has a simple example of any corporation, government or NGO that has requested and not gotten an address let me know. IPv6 addresses are available. That is not a constraint.”
 
Fouad Bajwa, a civil society member of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group, expressed concerns over the expense of the transition for people in developing nations. He appealed to representatives of governments attending IGF, saying, "When you are looking forward, you have to put the IPv6 investment in there to make it easier for the future." Beckstrom chimed in: "I had a discussion with Vint Cerf about this. Many of you have heard of the 'cash for clunkers' program for automobiles in the U.S. The idea I came up with is network cash for clunkers. Let the government help you replace clunker architecture. Governments could incentivize the implementation of IPv6 with DNSSEC. This could be in the form of credits, subsidies. If the countries of the world could look to stimulus funds to upgrade the network infrastructure, it would be great."

Janna Quitney Anderson is director of the Imagining the Internet Center and associate professor in the School of Communications at Elon University in North Carolina, USA. See more on IGF Egypt at www.imaginingtheinternet.org.