Ruling the Root Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace by Milton L. Mueller MIT Press, 332 pp., $32.95 AS THE INTERNET and its new technologies become ubiquitous, few of us recognize the control exercised by one obscure nonprofit organization in California. In “Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace,” Syracuse University professor Milton Mueller claims that the future of cyberspace is being controlled by a handful of industry and technology insiders who have built a new regulatory regime for the Internet. And they have done so in an opaque manner, without any accountability to the public, while the United States government blithely lets slip away its control over the system it helped create. As the Internet grew from a military-academic research initiative to a commercial venture, the technologists who laid its foundation began facing uncomfortable questions concerning ownership. Since the Internet consists of globally connected computer networks, the question of who should claim authority for the system proved highly contentious. A series of databases known as “root servers” essentially run the Internet, linking websites to the Internet addresses of servers. This system enabled the creation of domain names, which provided the essential element necessary to make the Internet commercially viable. Root servers contain registration information for domain names and ensure that each name is unique. Those two features made the system highly valuable to industries and technology enthusiasts, as well as the federal government. The fact that the system was global made it attractive to foreign nations. That’s where the problems with cyberspace began, according to Mueller. The granddaddy of these root servers (the “A” root) is in Herndon, Virginia, at the home of a federal contractor called Network Solutions that began providing public registration services back in 1995 under a deal with the National Science Foundation. The link between the functionality of the Internet and this root server launched a series of battles, with private companies, consumer advocates, civil liberties groups, and government officials wrangling for control. The value of the “A” root is immeasurable, for any organization that controls it can establish innovations on the web by adding new domain name suffixes (such as .com, .net, and .org). So, in 1998, many of the people who originally built the Internet infrastructure while working for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency moved to launch a private organization to resolve the issue of Internet authority. WHAT EMERGED from all this in 1998 was the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), formed by the Internet Society, the Internet Engineering Task Force, federal government agencies, and representatives of foreign nations. ICANN sought to fulfill what President Clinton’s White House Internet policy czar Ira Magaziner deemed necessary for the new economy: to leave the Internet in the hands of the private sector. ICANN would become the management authority for the Internet root. Aiming to craft efficient private-sector management of the global resource, ICANN was supposed to have a narrow focus, serving as a “technical coordination body.” It would oversee the day-to-day operations of the root servers and ensure the Internet’s addressing system functioned normally. The result has been anything but efficient private-sector leadership. Mueller argues that ICANN–as an organization without public accountability–has fallen prey to interest groups and technical insiders. “ICANN is not primarily concerned with technical coordination, nor is it a standards setting organization,” Mueller insists. “Rather, it is an institution that ties the need for technical coordination to regulation of the industry built around the resource it manages.” Take, for example, ICANN’s moves to expand the rights of copyright holders. Once consumers began to realize that domain names were valuable, many began trading in trademarked names. ICANN appeased intellectual-property interests by adopting a policy that all registrars or companies that sell Net domain names must make publicly available a database (known as WHOIS) that lists the name and address of every individual or organization that owns a web address. The move aimed to make it easier for trademark attorneys to ferret out infringements, despite the potential for privacy violations. Those same trademark interests also successfully talked ICANN into a policy that allows for private arbitration proceedings against web address holders deemed to be engaging in “bad faith” use of a trademarked domain name. This “Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy,” Mueller notes, was a massive expansion of trademark rights. The market for sellers of domain names is now valued at $2.5 billion–and all its participants are bound to ICANN by contract, which makes ICANN the arbiter of business plans for domain sellers. Mueller ignores some of the value ICANN’s policies have provided. For one thing, ICANN has fostered competition: Consumers now have choice of where to purchase Internet address services. More to the point, there has to be someone acting as a registrar. The Internet’s real value is that it is one system of interconnected networks. Most of the technical coordinators for other global systems, like the telephone, reside with United Nations groups such as the International Telecommunications Union–which are often dominated by less-developed nations and move at a snail’s pace. Is this what we want for the Internet? STILL, the stability of the organization that governs the Internet naming systems is crucial in the age where terrorists are increasingly relying on the web as their primary mode of communication and the American economy migrates from industrial to information-based. Mueller demands that ICANN discard its sheep’s clothing and declare itself a regulator. As such, it would need to implement a system of public accountability and operate in the open. For now, the only real check on ICANN’s authority is the distant threat of the Commerce Department, which has the power to refuse to renew ICANN’s role as an Internet governing body–a power Magaziner wanted to hand over to the nebulous “Internet community,” thus avoiding the touchy issue of having an American agency in control of an international utility. After the events of September 11, many federal lawmakers oppose letting ICANN maintain control over a key public asset. Indeed, Magaziner and many others involved in the establishment of ICANN now think that the organization has faltered dramatically. They’re right. But ICANN has convened a widely publicized process to overhaul its structure, which will probably be enough to convince the Commerce Department not to interfere. Disturbing as “Ruling the Root” is, Milton Mueller is likely to have plenty of fodder for a sequel. Maureen Sirhal writes for National Journal’s Technology Daily.
