Foreign spies might take advantage of the current plan to remove the Internet’s governing body from American control, unless the Obama administration ensures that military and government website domains are totally secure, according to a House Republican lawmaker.
“Cybersecurity is put at risk if any foreign government or private entities are allowed to use .gov or .mil domains,” Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., told the Washington Examiner. “It just opens a Pandora’s box that we might never be able to close again.”
So Kelly has proposed legislation that would require the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is the Commerce Department agency that has indirect power over the Internet, to delay the long-awaited transition to international control until after the federal government certified that no entity outside the federal government will be able to use the .gov or .mil websites.
The Securing America’s Internet Domains Act of 2016 would require the NTIA and Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to enter into a permanent contract to “formalize” what he called a long-standing “gentleman’s agreement” between the U.S. government and ICANN, a nonprofit organization that has long maintained direct oversight of the Internet. Without such a contract in place, the bill would bar the transition.
“It’s not that we have to have sovereignty, but we do have to have oversight over something that we created for the whole world to use and serves so many different functions,” he said. “There have to be certain safeguards.”
Kelly worries the informal agreement could lapse, which he suggested would turn the Internet into a “party line” phone system, in an allusion to the old telephone systems that allowed multiple households to use the same line.
“We want to make sure that, now and forever more, these are our sites so that nobody can jump on using a .gov or .mil,” he said. “When you look at the Internet right now, if you don’t secure the .mil or the .gov, you open up then the opportunity for other people to have that same site and then they have the ability to use it, and to take it for their own use.”
It’s one of multiple GOP proposals that could delay the transition, which proponents of the new style of Internet governance fear could inspire China and Russia to attempt to take control of the Internet in their countries.
“The notion of a delay simply sends the signal that the U.S. believes that the role we hold is so valuable that we’re not giving it up, and we’ve reiterated to China, Russia and the United Nations that they want to step into those shoes,” Netchoice Executive Director Steve DelBianco told a Senate panel in May. “And that’s the biggest danger of the delay.”
Kelly is unmoved by such fears. “I think it would be hard to sit back and look at China and Russia and think that they’re acting in the best interest of the United States,” he said. “Here’s what I’m saying: America first. America first, our cybersecurity first. The domains that we have and … have had since the formation of the Internet are forever and in perpetuity are protected.”
