By SCOTT DEWING
Published: February 2006

IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE, but less than 10 years ago one man controlled the Internet. Well, not the entire Internet, but the domain name extensions—such as “.com”, “.net”, “.org”—used on the World Wide Web, which is a major component of the formless virtual glob that we call “the Internet.” His name was John Postel. In the 1960s, Postel was one of a handful of computer scientist and engineers who built the Internet, an effort that was funded and incubated by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

For more than 30 years, Postel was the guy who made decisions and managed domain name extensions, including the creation and ownership assignment of “country-specific” domain name extensions such as “.uk” for the United Kingdom. Today, it may not seem to have made much sense for a pony-tailed computer scientist to have hegemony over a country’s domain name extension, but back in its “early days”, the Internet was largely unknown to the global community and there was usually no official organization to hand off control of a country-specific domain. So, short of that, Postel made the decisions.

All of this changed in 1998, when the Clinton administration helped broker the establishment of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit that would manage domain name extensions and IP addresses. The birth of ICANN was both tumultuous and painful, with bitter disagreements among the business community, governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Postel was right in the center of the negotiations and some say that it’s what killed him. He died of a heart attack during the debate over ICANN’s creation and never got to see the birth of his successor and all the incredible growth and change the Internet that he helped build would undergo.

The debate over control of domain extensions did not end, however, with the death of Postel and the creation of ICANN. ICANN has continued to be plagued by problems and embroiled in controversy. ICANN’s critics claim that it lacks legitimacy and accountability—or, at best, it is ultimately accountable only to the U.S. Department of Commerce, which doesn’t seem quite right for a supposedly impartial organization that controls other countries’ domain name extensions.

Since its inception, ICANN has been variously accused of “cultural imperialism”, “electronic colonialism” and “information apartheid.” Businesses complain that ICANN, while an NGO, is “too governmental” in regards to its regulatory control and decision-making powers over the creation of new domains. As the international community and developing countries caught up to the information age and became aware of the power of the Internet, many foreign governments were appalled to find out that, for the most part, the Internet was controlled by the U.S. government or U.S. organizations working under the ultimate control of the U.S. government.

That controversy reached a fever-pitch last November at the U.N.’s World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis where the U.N., the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and various foreign governments called for control of the Internet to be handed over to an international organization operating under the auspices of the U.N. That organization would be the Internet Governance Forum (IFG), which according to the ITU, would be convened by the U.N. Secretary-General, “to foster and enable multi-stakeholder dialogue on public policy and development issues.” In other words, the U.N. would control the Internet.

The preposterousness of such a ludicrous suggestion as having an international body control and govern an international communications infrastructure that is at the heart of the global economy was not lost on those within the Bush administration.

“The Internet is a U.S. invention, a U.S. creation and we gave it to the world,” said Michael Gallagher, Assistant Secretary at the Department of Commerce. In other words, “shut up and be grateful that we’re sharing.”

Criticism of the U.N. plan has come from right-wing apologists as well. In response to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s 2005 World Report, former FCC commissioner, Harold Furchtgott-Roth claimed that, “These reports—written as Marxist texts filled with redistributive propaganda and an aggrandized view of expanded U.N. meddling—are scary.”

Yes, we really must prevent the U.N. from “meddling” in affairs that affect the entire international community—especially with its demonstrated track-record of peddling Marxist “propaganda”. You know, it’s kind of like with a row of dominos on end: it just takes that first one to tip over and, well, there’s the whole world painted in commie red.

ICANN returned from Tunis beat up and tired, but survived, mostly because the Bush administration gave a clear “no way” message to the U.N. and the international community regarding transfer of ICANN’s role to an international body, driving yet another wedge between the U.S. and the rest of the world as if everything—including the Internet—has to be an “us v. them” scenario rather than “me, you, us.”

ICANN will continue to control domain name extensions and assignments. And while some countries and critics continue to call upon the U.S. government to relinquish ICANN’s control to the U.N., the best acronym they’ll get out of the deal for now is: UCAN’T.