The Foreign Service Journal, January 2006

J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 11 Yes, ICANN! In November, representatives from 174 countries and more than 800 NGOs attended the second World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, organized by the United Nations’ International Telecommuni- cations Union ( http://www.itu.int/ home ). The ITU, headquartered in Geneva, is a U.N. body through which governments and the private sector coordinate global telecommunication networks and services. The United States is among its 189 member states. The summit, held Nov. 16-18, was convened to “tackle the problem of the ‘digital divide’ and harness the potential of information and commu- nication technologies to drive econom- ic and social development.” However, these worthy objectives were largely overshadowed by a dispute over the United States’ central role in adminis- tering the Domain Name System — the structure of network addresses (.com, .org, etc.) that computers use to communicate with one another to find Web pages and route e-mail, among other functions. Because the Internet originated in the U.S., the Department of Com- merce retained authority over these matters worldwide until 1998, when it delegated day-to-day management to Internet Cooperation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a diverse, non- political organization with an interna- tional board ( www.icann.org/gener al ). In September the European Union joined Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and others in opposing the predominant role of ICANN in man- aging the Internet. The E.U. and other governments are pushing for greater United Nations authority over this sphere, arguing that entrusting that responsi- bility to a single country is potentially dangerous. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan was outspoken in Tunis: “The United States deserves our thanks for having developed the Internet and making it available to the world. … But I think you also all [should] acknowledge the need for more international participation in discussions of Internet governance issues” ( http://www.itu.int/wsis/ tunis/statements/docs/io-un-open ing/1.html ). “The Europeans are eager to stand up to the Americans, and that I think has been produced by the last five years of U.S. foreign policy. It’s not really a cyberlaw problem,” asserts Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law at Stanford University and a columnist for Wired magazine, in a recent Foreign Policy magazine interview ( http://www.foreignpolicy.com /story/cms.php?story_id=3306 ). The Institute for Policy Innovation, a Texas-based think-tank, has come to a similar conclusion. “The United Nations and the European Union are pushing for international management because critics are uncomfortable with — and jealous of — what is viewed as American hegemony, when in fact, the U.S. does not control the Internet. It simply oversees it.” IPI offers a wide array of background information, radio clips and expert opinion about this topic on its Web site ( http://www.ipi . org/ ). Critics of the proposal also point to the fact that the most vocal opponents of the current arrangement include China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, all of which restrict their citizens’ Internet usage to repress nascent democratic movements. As it happened, the challengers had no way to force the U.S. to give up control, and America was adamant about leaving arrangements in place. David Goss, the U.S. delegation head, made this position clear ( http://usin fo.state.gov/gi/Archive/2005/Nov/ 50 Years Ago... If you spend a lifetime discussing [issues] with people of other countries, you acquire a habit of seeing two sides, which exist in so many questions. This tends to create a sense of balance and measure in forming judgments and, above all, an ingrained suspicion of all one-sided points of view. — Sir David Kelly, from “The Lost Art of Diplomacy,” FSJ , January 1956. C YBERNOTES