UN's Desire to Seize the Internet

Here's a nasty topic. Want to see the Internet come to a crashing end? Want to see security defined by countries like China? Want to see the UN bureaucracy controlling one of the largest economic ventures in the US? I certainly can see a couple of reasons to resist this. [h/t TriggerFinger]

An international political spat is brewing over whether the United Nations will seize control of the heart of the Internet.

U.N. bureaucrats and telecommunications ministers from many less-developed nations claim the U.S. government has undue influence over how things run online. Now they want to be the ones in charge.

While the formal proposal from a U.N. working group will be released July 18, it's already clear what it will contain. A preliminary summary of governmental views claims there's a "convergence of views" supporting a new organization to oversee crucial Internet functions, most likely under the aegis of the United Nations or the International Telecommunications Union. [emphasis original]

I'll state straight out that I work for a company that provides security solutions for the internet. I've seen some of the ITU solutions and I'm really really convinced that they shouldn't be given control.

At issue is who decides key questions like adding new top-level domains, assigning chunks of numeric Internet addresses, and operating the root servers that keep the Net humming. Other suggested responsibilities for this new organization include Internet surveillance, "consumer protection," and perhaps even the power to tax domain names to pay for "universal access."

I don't see much issue in sharing decisions of number use or domain name decisions. Personally I think those are pretty much trivial concerns. But, control of the infrastructure and taxes I think should never be given to the UN or any agency related to it. As for surveillance, I think that concern is going to be controlled by the country where the infrastructure lies, and what the UN or the US decides for that is something that they won't ever control.

Then there are some of the specific complaints by some countries:

Syria: "There's more and more spam every day. Who are the victims? Developing and least-developed countries, too. There is no serious intention to stop this spam by those who are the transporters of the spam, because they benefit...The only solution is for us to buy equipment from the countries which send this spam in order to deal with spam. However, this, we believe, is not acceptable."

Oh, you have to buy equipment everyone else has to buy? My heart bleeds for you. Might have to spend some of those huge oil profits you have?

Brazil, responding to ICANN's approval of .xxx domains: "For those that are still wondering what Triple-X means, let's be specific, Mr. Chairman. They are talking about pornography. These are things that go very deep in our values in many of our countries. In my country, Brazil, we are very worried about this kind of decision-making process where they simply decide upon creating such new top-level generic domain names."

Oh, please. If a domain has an .xxx then you can control access to those domains if your country really desires that level of censorship. Brazil is bitching about this? If you can't figure out what the domain prefix means, then go on the web and look it up. How bloody stupid.

China: "We feel that the public policy issue of Internet should be solved jointly by the sovereign states in the U.N. framework...For instance, spam, network security and cyberspace--we should look for an appropriate specialized agency of the United Nations as a competent body."

Ok, couple of big issues here. Do I want countries like China defining what is allowed for security on the internet? I'd say NO. If you need to understand why, you should probably look at the government that is there and the repression of people's political speech in that country. There has already been proposals attempted in the US to require that encrypted traffic use keys that the government controls so that they can view your internet traffic if they wished. Guess where that concept went. Now you believe that China should have a say in that policy?

And WHEN did the UN become a "competent body?"

Those proclamations served to flush out the Bush administration, which recently announced that it will not hand over control of Internet domain names and addresses to anyone else.

That high-profile snub of the United Nations could presage an international showdown. The possibility of a political flap over what has long been an abstruse Net-governance issue casts a shadow over ICANN's meeting this week in Luxembourg, and will be the topic of a July 28 symposium in Washington, D.C., called "Regime Change on the Internet."

Beyond the usual levers of diplomatic pressure and public kvetching, Brazil and China could choose what amounts to the nuclear option: a fragmented root. That means a new top-level domain would not be approved by ICANN--but would be recognized and used by large portions of the rest of the world. The downside, of course, is that the nuclear option could create a Balkanized Internet where two computers find different Web sites at the same address.

"It wasn't until now" that a fragmented root was being talked about, says Milton Mueller, a professor at Syracuse University and participant in the Internet Governance Project. "China and other countries might be pursuing responses that lead to fragmentation."

Such an outcome remains remote, but it could happen. That possibility means an obscure debate about Internet governance has suddenly become surprisingly important.

Balkanization of the Internet would be incredibly foolish. The effectiveness would be greatly reduced and considering that the vast majority of the structures which make up the WWW exist in the US, this policy would pretty much hurt those countries who choose to segregate themselves from the Internet overall.

Fine, give the ITU the names and numbers control. Ensure that they are forced to implement IPv6 so that they can't screw it up by restricting address space through petty politics. (IPv4 has 4,294,967,296 addresses while IPv6 has 3.4e38 addresses.)

But as for content control, security, and infrastructure, the control of those items should remain in local control or be controlled by market influences. Yeah, capitalism. You can be assured that if a Communist country defines or controls those areas, no one will have control or security.