Back when the internet was a gleam in the eye of the US
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the question of control
was easy. The people that controlled it were the people that built
it, and they could be counted on the fingers of two
hands.
Now that the internet has grown into a huge commercial force,
understanding who controls it becomes more difficult – especially
given that parties are fighting for dominance at different layers
of the stack.
Consider its naming policy. The history of name allocation is a
long and chequered one, centring on the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the organisation created by the
US government to govern certain naming functions such as the
creation of top-level domains (TLDs) such as .com. Icann also
ensures that internet addresses entered under the Domain Name
System (DNS) are universally resolvable.
Icann has been criticised by industry watchers who accuse it of
a lack of accountability, no more so than when it recently
finalised an agreement with domain name registrar VeriSign, which
administers the .com registration and DNS name resolution
process.
The agreement, which failed to gain backing from 40% of Icann’s
members, gave Verisign the right to increase charges for .com
domain registrations by a compound rate of 31% over the next six
years, along with the right to renew the administration of the .com
domain in perpetuity. In short, VeriSign now owns the .com TLD.
Paul Twomey, president and chief executive of Icann, said the
market is being liberalised, which always causes consternation. But
it is difficult to see how it is being liberalised when one
organisation owns the .com domain. Why can there not be more than
one registry?
“The problem is that you cannot go faster than the speed of
light,” he said. “If you set up two registries to operate .com, and
you registered a domain in one and I tried to register one in the
other, it is feasible that you could end up with a domain
registered to two people.”
But this is A-level computing stuff, surely? Couldn’t you run
everything using a two-phase commit database, operating on the
established principles of atomicity, consistency, isolation and
durability?
“Who pays for it?” countered Twomey.
He said the presumptive renewal agreement was already awarded as
part of an existing agreement made in 2001. In return for the
agreement, VeriSign will drop litigation against Icann sparked off
when in 2004 Icann forced VeriSign to close its controversial
Sitefinder service, which intercepted internet searches that would
have normally resulted in a “no such domain” response and
redirected them to VeriSign-specified websites. Icann could have
fought on with the litigation, but wanted to minimise its costs,
said the organisation.
Domain registrants Network Solutions, which used to govern the
.com domain and was owned by VeriSign, and Go Daddy are both
concerned about Icann’s decision. And the Canadian Internet
Registration Authority has effectively boycotted the organisation
because of what it sees as unfair practices. It has suspended the
voluntary contribution of funds and consideration of any
accountability framework, and declined to host, or be a major
sponsor of any Icann event.
No wonder that name allocation figures so highly in discussions
of internet governance. But the question of control is just as much
about the traffic that travels over the network and how it gets to
the end-user, as it is about naming structures.
Delivering the internet has been a crucial issue over the past
few years. In the US and the UK, the telecoms unbundling process
enabled DSL providers to deliver local loop broadband services to
customers, opening up choice beyond incumbent suppliers and
creating competition. But the coming battle in the US – which could
easily slip into the European market – is now over double charging,
and it has Vint Cerf hopping mad.
Cerf, commonly described as the father of the internet, has been
representing Google (for whom he is chief net evangelist) alongside
organisations including Microsoft, eBay and Amazon in lobbying the
US House Committee on Energy and Commerce on what he sees as a
threat to the freedom of the internet.
The issue revolves around a concept called “net neutrality”.
Proponents suggest that the internet’s status as an inherently dumb
network that simply passes data packets along is linked to the
democratic nature of the network at a fundamental level. This model
is inherently different to the model used in conventional telephone
networks, where the intelligence is in the centre of the network
rather than at the edge.
Cerf and his cohorts may have designed the internet to be dumb,
but what happens if the telcos try to make it “smart”?
We might soon find out, if telcos such as Verizon, Comcast and
AT&T have their say. Congress is currently considering ways to
update the US Telecommunications Act, introducing a regulatory
framework for the internet and telecoms. As politicians mull this
over, the larger telcos are lobbying for a relaxation of net
neutrality rules, enabling them to provide (and charge for)
different levels of service according to what users are doing.
This ability could enable companies to charge end-users more for
using technology such as voice over IP, or perhaps block it
altogether. It could also empower them to provide different levels
of service to back-end content providers based on how much they can
pay for prioritised traffic.
Telco executives are already complaining about having to carry
the traffic of successful web-based firms. “They don’t have any
fibre out there. They don’t have any wires. They don’t have
anything,” Edward Whitacre, then-CEO of SouthWestern Bell, told
BusinessWeek last November. “They use my lines for free – and
that’s bull. For a Google or a Yahoo or a Vonage or anybody to
expect to use these pipes for free is nuts.”
Deutsche Telecom chief executive Kai-Uwe Ricke is also eager to
get more revenue from the local loop. “Customers should not be the
only ones to pay for this new world. Web companies that use this
infrastructure for their business should also make a contribution,”
he told German paper WirtschaftsWoche. “If customers are not
willing to pay and Google and [others] are not willing to pay,
there will not be any high-speed data highways.”
But why should the internet have to pay for the failings of the
telcos, asked Cerf?
“They are saying ‘we can’t make our business model work’ and my
reaction to this is that you chose to build this broadband service,
and you did it without having a business model that would support
it,” he said.
He likened the telcos’ stance to the protection racketeers who
operated during Prohibition in the US, charging businesses
“insurance” while implicitly threatening damage should they fail to
comply.
People may be disappointed to see this happen, but no one should
be surprised. “It used to be that the internet was sold through
speeds and feeds. It was about the price of internet connectivity
and how fast you could get it. Now you are starting to see
providers talk about clean pipes, because no one wants to be in the
business of selling commodities,” said Craig Labovitz, director of
network architecture at Arbor Networks, who has directed several US
National Science Foundation research grants.
Opportunities for bundled services and innovations such as TV
over DSL have helped to buoy revenues, but telcos’ core competency
was never content; it was pipes. Faced with competition from adept
content providers online, it is no wonder that these companies are
becoming defensive.
The US administration’s friendliness towards big business
promises to exacerbate the situation. Verizon now owns MCI, and
Whitacre is now chief executive of AT&T, following its
acquisition by South Western Bell, further reducing the number of
local loop options for consumers. The anti-neutrality sabre
rattling among large telcos should be particularly worrying for
advocates of internet democracy.
“This is at best an anti-competitive and anti-innovative step.
Most of the interesting new applications on the net have been
introduced by parties that did not have much in the way of
resources,” said Cerf.
Even those companies with substantial resources, such as
Microsoft and Adobe, which support the net neutrality stance when
it comes to the local group, could be doing their own bit to
control the internet. Rich internet applications, which use
proprietary markup languages to create a better experience for the
user, ostensibly aim to fix the internet by resolving the problems
created by HTML, but Cerf is unhappy about that too.
“What you see here is a fundamental tension between innovation
and an opportunity to try to grab market share and lock customers
in, which is what non-interoperable protocols tend to do,” he
said.
Microsoft executives have already admitted that the non-Windows
version of its Windows Presentation Framework will not have the
same level of graphical capability as native Windows version. Ask
them whether they are breaking the internet, and they will argue
that they are offering an “augmented web experience”. Adobe simply
refuses to comment.
Addressing this issue, the World Wide Web Consortium has
launched a working group for rich web clients. It said, “[We aim to
produce] a deliverable that should be based on an existing
application/UI format, such as Mozilla’s XUL, Microsoft’s XAML,
Macromedia’s MXML or Laszlo Systems’ LZX, provided the owners of
the format are willing to contribute.”
Which, as we prepare to deprecate HTML in favour of rich web
markup, rather begs the question: who really does control the
internet?
Creating your own TLD
If you do not like the way that the top-level domain allocation
and domain naming system is working, you could always create your
own. Several organisations have tried. New.net used a browser
plug-in to interpret non-standard TLDs, such as .books, resolving
them to a domain such as .books.new.net, essentially creating its
own range of virtual TLDs. The practice drew complaints from
organisations including Icann.
The Chinese, unhappy with the way that the internet is governed,
have operated a similar plugin that enables people to type in what
looks like .com in Chinese, but translates it into
.com.cn, essentially creating a local version of the .com subdomain
behind what is in effect a digital Chinese wall.