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The US is trying to appease international unease about its stranglehold over the net by relinquishing -- at least nominally -- some responsibility. But don't be fooled, argues Julia Powles

The battle over the future of the internet has begun in earnest.


Bear with us: it's immensely technical, but it's also immensely important.

Because the internet first emerged, grew, and prospered in the United States, the US government has a special relationship and disproportionate influence over what is now regarded as a global public good. While the US is unwilling to relinquish its role as chief internet steward, this is becoming an increasingly untenable position, particularly as the NSA/Snowden revelations continue to shake global confidence.

In this context, and perhaps accelerated by last week's damning critiques in the European Parliament and the UN Human Rights Council, the US government announced late on Friday, in a smart front-footed move, that it intends to release oversight of its long-treasured IANA contract under which the US Commerce Department contracts

ICANN, a private US company, to perform key internet administration tasks. The government has proposed a transition plan for these tasks to be administered directly by the "global multistakeholder community" (read: ICANN), via a process to be determined by ICANN and approved by the US government in September 2015. This prescriptive, carefully-limited announcement is the long-awaited fulfilment of a promise made 16 years ago when ICANN first came into being, and it would be the first time since the net's inception that the US government would abandon formal oversight. Of course, US vested interests in ICANN as a US-based company, subject to US law, and partial to US industry, remain, as does the almighty US technical and economic leverage over the digital ecosystem.


You might think (and you'd be right), that it is rather odd that one country, and indeed one company, even holds this net administration contract. But such are the breaks of history and the clutch of commerce.

We are moving inexorably towards a situation where enormous amounts of control are centred in private hands.

The keen desire to avoid conceding control to foreign governments is made clear in the US government's statement that it "will not accept a proposal" for transitioning the IANA contract that involves a "government-led or an inter-governmental organisation solution". By keeping control in ICANN, where US government and corporate interests are largely fused, the US retains de facto control. The US supports its moves by raising the spectre of censorship, splinternets, and lethargic administration that would supposedly follow from greater governmental involvement. What this obscures is that there are many players in the international community and inter-governmental solutions are a necessary part of having an accountable private sector, as well as ensuring that concerns of security, privacy, freedom of expression, broad participation, and equal access are met. Again, the NETmundial submissions show that these are matters of concern to a considerable number of stakeholders, but they may now be sidelined and replaced by anointing ICANN with a multistakeholder blessing, keeping net governance in the private sphere and away from inter-governmental oversight. This would be a disappointing result for anyone concerned about the asymmetric US influence over the net, however laudable and necessary this was in the past.

It is intriguing that deep anti-government scepticism in some quarters post-Snowden has not been matched by a similar degree of backlash in relation to big corporates. Of course, if GCHQ was able to peek in on Yahoo video chats, we must not forget that Yahoo has at its disposal that entire data vault, regulated under its own policies, and those policies may change at will. It is one thing to be scouring data for national security risks, but quite another for profit-making. Everyone loves and trusts Google, but what will happen when it is challenged, as it inevitably will be, by competition? The next-gen smart paid subscription service with end-to-end encryption on email and search, for those with a price-point on privacy, is just waiting to happen, and it would result in a mass exodus of stores of valuable information.

We are concerned about government regulation of free speech on YouTube, but what about YouTube's open freedom to do exactly that itself? When the CEO of Facebook can call up the US government and demand it fall into line with no-one questioning the adequacy of international oversight and regulation of Facebook itself, it suggests we are sleep-walking into an overly comfortable relationship with the web's private data kings. There is nothing benign about an incumbent private corporation with greedy shareholders and a rapidly declining stock.


With the web's highways being dominated so intimately by a few global tech companies, principally from the US, we would be wise to anticipate the potential fire from their fall. This is yet a further reason why a private body such as ICANN, unaccountable except to its own members, laden with US private interests, and with governments kept in an exclusively advisory capacity, is a worryingly distorted vehicle for regulating the internet's future.

This is a guest post by Julia Powles, who researches and writes on law, science and technology at the University of Cambridge. You can follow her on Twitter at @juliapowles

Updated 20/03/14: The reference to "inter-governmental oversight" in the original article was replaced with the broader notion of "external oversight". This seeks to clarify the message that ICANN should be accountable and that internet governance must promote global civic values. Antithetical to this would be lobby-driven inter-governmental inputs that seek to hardwire concerns of copyright and trademark protection, online safety, national security, or consumer protection (SOPA/ACTA/CALEA-style) into technical DNS and other functions.