lsi on Wed, 12 Oct 2005 16:42:17 +0200 (CEST)


<nettime> EU says internet could fall apart

[The problem with the 'walled garden' approach is that users often are penalised
either by no interconnection, high interconnect fees (due to monopoly power of
service providers over gateways), sluggish performance, and restricted
functionality.  This issue has been coming to a head for years.  ICANN does suck -
the potential for government abuse sucks too.  The real problem here seems to be
the existence of a central core.  The real solution, therefore is to remove the
central core from the DNS.  At the end of the day, the root servers are single
points of failure and ripe for attack.  The DNS must be redesigned to make it
completely distributed, improving resiliency and security while also removing the
problem of who gets to be King. More articles on this here:

- Stu],16559,1589967,00.html

EU says internet could fall apart 

Developing countries demand share of control 
US says urge to censor underlies calls for reform 

Richard Wray
Wednesday October 12, 2005
The Guardian 

more control.

in Tunisia next month the internet will split apart.

contract to the US department of commerce.

sharing internet governance which politicians could unveil at the UN-sponsored

made it such a success will disappear.

could be that the internet falls apart."

of freedom of expression.

Michael Gallagher, President Bush's internet adviser and head of the national
telecommunications and information administration, believes they are seizing on

department has not once interfered with its decisions.

online for 27bn daily user sessions.

governance of essentially technical institutions is a way to promote technological

'Valuable dot'

According to Emily Taylor, director of legal and policy issues at Nominet, which
oversees the address categories such as .co or .org - root zone files known as
top-level domain names - bearing Britain's .uk suffix, the spat in Geneva was "all
about the root - the valuable dot at the end of domain names".

At present Icann decides what new top-level domain names to create and who should
run the existing domains, in consultation with a panel called the Governmental
Advisory Committee. In practice the GAC exerts more pressure on Icann than the US
department of commerce ever has. It was at the GAC's urging that a recent request
to create more top-level domain names was reviewed. The commerce department does
have the power to clear Icann's decisions.

Icann's president, Paul Twomey, shares many of the US government concerns. He is
adamant that his organisation should be allowed to evolve rather than be brushed
aside in favour of some untried model of state-led internet governance.

"We are firmly committed to a multi-stakeholder approach," he said.  "We expect to
evolve, we expect to keep changing. We are concerned about stability [of the
internet] and we think it's best to evolve existing institutions. Our present
corporate structure is a matter of history, not of any particular design."

But designing new structures is exactly what the international community seems
intent on doing. At one end of the spectrum are Iran, Pakistan and other so-called
control-oriented states that want to create a new governing council for the web to
which Icann would be accountable. The remit of this council seems broad enough to
include questions of content, a worry for advocates of free speech on the web.

Two week's ago the EU proposed its own structure, which consists of what it calls
a "cooperation model" to deal with Icann and a forum which would allow
governments, interested organisations and industry to discuss internet issues and
swap best practice.


"What we are talking about is a governance structure that is extremely
lightweight, where the government oversight of internet functions is limited just
to the list of essential tasks," said one EU negotiator.

While the forum "does not decide anything, it is a place where people can come to
a view and generally participate in thinking about the internet and the way it is

driven by interests that should not be ours.

"We really can't have a Europe that is applauded by China and Iran and Saudi
Arabia on the future governance of the internet. Even those critical of the United
States must see where such a position risks taking us."

But EU negotiators are adamant that they reject calls for state control of the
content of the internet. "None of this is about content and that is a big
difference between the EU position and the position of China and Brazil," the
negotiator said. "The proposals that came from Brazil and the others to amend our
own proposal were not acceptable, they were trying to drag us closer to their
position.  We are very alive to that."

Calls from Argentina for a continuing debate while Icann is restructured are
believed to have garnered support from countries such as Canada which do not like
the perceived power that the US has over the internet but are wary of opening up
the web to overall state control.

Just before the meeting in Tunis, there will be a three-day gathering of
bureaucrats to try to thrash out a deal on internet governance.  Getting the
parties - especially the US - to agree to anything looks like a near impossible
task but Mrs Reding believes it is crucial to find common ground or see the global
communication network disintegrate.

The firm US stand makes that prospect of an end to ubiquity seem imminent.
Although any decision from the Tunis summit would have no legal standing, the
current deal between Icann and the US government is due to come to an end in
September next year, by which time the organisation is supposed to be made
independent under the deal made during the Clinton presidency.

Mr Gallagher said that after the Tunis meeting there will be further discussion
with governments and the private sector about the future of the organisation. "But
we are not going to bureaucratise, politicise and retard the management of the
DNS. Period," he said.  "That will not happen. We will not agree to it in November
and we will not do it in September 2006."


Domain Name System

The DNS is the address book of the internet, matching numeric IP addresses to
alphabetic addresses such as, which people find easier to
remember. But instead of one central list of everyone's internet address, which
would be massive, it splits addresses into their constituent parts - called
domains - and gives each machine in the network enough information to know where
to locate the next machine down the line. This is known as a distributed database.


The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a not-for- profit
organisation that manages the DNS. It decides who gets to operate the most basic
domains, the top-level domains such as .com and .org as well as all the world's
country codes. It is responsible for allocating space on the internet. It was set
up in California under contract to the department of commerce and as such it is
subject to California state law and any disagreements have to be taken up with
that state's courts.

TCP and IP

Internet Protocol (IP) is the technology that allows data to cross networks, using
a destination address (IP address) to make sure it reaches the right place.
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), meanwhile, ensures the correct delivery of
that data or its re- transmission if it gets lost. Together they are the tarmac of
the information superhighway.

Root zone file

Although the DNS is a distributed database it needs a starting point, a list of
where to go for the first part of an internet address and start a search for a
particular machine. This list of where to start is called the root zone file. It
is a list of 248 country code top- level domains (ccTLDs) - such as .uk and .fr -
as well as 14 generic top-level domains (gTLDs), which are subject-based such as
.com and .net and .org. The list, held on 13 machines across the world, says who
runs these domains and where to find them.

Stuart Udall
stuart net -


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