President Obama’s administration is at risk of relinquishing control of the Internet without conducting the testing necessary to ensure the successor model for managing the Internet will work, according to a group of Senate Republicans.
The current system underpinning Internet domain names has been managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, under the auspices of an agency in the Commerce Department. Federal officials have mulled distancing itself from this system since 1997, but the process began in earnest after Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency leaks embarrassed the Obama administration and outraged foreign government leaders.
But Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., fears that the transition is taking place too quickly. “[T]he Internet is too important to allow the transition to occur without certainty that the proposed accountability measures are adequate and that ICANN’s new governance structure works properly,” he wrote in a letter to National Telecommunications and Information Administration chief Lawrence Strickling, an assistant Commerce secretary who is reviewing the transition plan.
Four other Republicans joined the letter following a hearing about the plan earlier on Tuesday: Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, Nevada Sen. Dean Heller, Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan, and Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt.
“I honestly don’t believe that proceeding cautiously on this is to our detriment, and I think fully understandable, given the scope of what we’re talking about here,” Rubio said during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing Tuesday. “And, I would say also that while we still control the process and the timeline, once we move past a certain point, there is no leverage to pull back.”
One of the witnesses at the hearing countered that a delay would be pointless. “We can’t test extreme emergency measures such as we’ve built over any period of a few months or even a few years,” Netchoice executive director Steve DelBianco argued. “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. And that’s the biggest danger of the delay.”
Delbianco argued that transitioning to an international, multi-stakeholder program would actually diminish the likelihood that the Chinese communist regime dominates the Internet. “This is a development that would dramatically undermine the authoritarians’ arguments that only governments can truly manage something as powerful as the Internet,” he said in his written testimony.
But Rubio noted that Chinese government is already trying to take control of the Internet domain systems, as the Commerce and State Department officials recently noted, and argued that the United States shouldn’t move hastily because of those types of authoritarian regimes.
“In the context of what’s happening geopolitically in the South China Sea is an example where China is a signatory to the Law to Sea Treaty, and yet they are taking over illegitimate territorial claims that they’re exercising, building artificial islands, claiming territory that doesn’t belong to them, and basically ignoring the mechanisms by which all of that is supposed to be regulated,” he said. “If they do that for islands, why would they not do it for the Internet, one of the most powerful tools in human history?”
