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Keep hands off the net
THE INTERNET seemed to come out of nowhere. Governments didn’t plan it, international institutions didn’t even discuss it and the industry didn’t expect it.
Most remarkable in its growth was the apparent absence of governance of any kind. The US government certainly wasn’t in control, except for some minor areas like domain names. Other governments, conservative to varying degrees, were horrified to discover a lack of content control which they could do almost nothing about.
The telecom companies that carried the traffic were too busy selling bandwidth at growth rates of up to 500 per cent per annum to worry that here, for the first time, significant technological innovations in telecommunications had happened outside their control, and even without too much of their involvement.
Decisions relating to new developments in telecommunications had traditionally been hammered out at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Progress took place at the rate at which lawyers in Geneva could come to an agreement.
The ITU got its first taste of the power of the internet when its X.400 email standard was summarily rejected. Turning its nose up at the already established internet standard for email, the ITU thought it knew better. Its idea of typing in an email address was filling out an entire form.
Instead of using tried and tested TCP-IP software, telecom companies wrote their own and the interface between the two became problematic. Hardly anyone remembers the X.400 standard any more. Today, Wi-Fi — what you may call wireless internet — is seriously undermining Bluetooth and 3G, both technologies in which ITU and telecom companies have made huge investments.
Governments, telecom companies and the ITU remind me of a leader of the French Revolution, who, looking out of the window, said: “There go my people. I better find out where they are going, so I can lead them there.”
Towards this end, the ITU organized, in 2003, a major international gathering of NGOs, telecom companies and governments in Geneva — the World Summit on the Information Society. It was preceded by several smaller meetings all over the world.
The outcome? I remember posting to my mailing list India-gii, on the completion of WSIS Geneva, that they should have handed out a t-shirt there, which said: “I went to WSIS, and all I got were two lousy committees.”
So, all WSIS achieved was a committee to look into finance, which so far has not been able to come up with any money to actually bridge the digital divide and another one on Internet Governance.
Internet Governance? Of all the problems confronting the world, was this issue worthy of all the attention it was getting? Lately, serious proposals have been made for the ITU to take over control of internet IP addresses, which serve the same purpose on the internet as do telephone numbers in the telecom network. Is this necessary?
When seeking to understand what is implied by internet governance, it might help to compare it with networks we understand better, such as those for water, electricity or telephones. What is our expectation from those who run the electricity network, for example?
We would like, firstly, that the network functions smoothly. Secondly, we want it to address future growth. If I decide to move to a larger house or buy a couple of air-conditioners, the network should not break down.
One would like to see technological progress, so that over time the network becomes more useful and functions more reliably. And finally, we would like that governance not add too much to the cost of service provision.
Let us see how the internet has done so far in these areas. The reliability of the internet is already legendary. Saddam Hussein used internet technology for the communication network of his armed forces and no matter how many nodes the Americans knocked out, the remaining network came back up again.
Similarly, in the aftermath of 9/11, the telephone network choked, but the internet largely kept going. Your local ISP may not be that reliable, but that is hardly a reflection on the internet as a whole.
The internet has not only managed furious numeric growth rate with hardly a hitch, but it has also exhibited rapid technological progress as well. Email, chat, the web, e-commerce and file sharing are just some of the innovations that we have seen in the last two decades and each have had profound impact. Once, the postman was a much-awaited daily visitor. But now who uses paper and envelopes to send letters?
The publishing industry once published vast quantities of glossy pamphlets to distribute at exhibitions. Now, few people bother to even visit, let alone pick up the “raddi.” While e-commerce is transforming the way business is done in industry after industry, file sharing is perceived as a serious threat by the huge entertainment industries.
Moreover, technological progress on the internet is showing no signs of slowing down. RSS (Rich Site Summary) has made it easier to keep track of news electronically as compared to perusing several paper newspapers and magazines. Blogs have become an exciting new form of journalism and wikis allow people to collaborate in a small classroom, or internationally, as in the mighty Wikipedia.
To appreciate how inexpensive the internet is, a comparison with the telephone network is apt. People use phones to send data in the form of SMS. If we assume that a typical SMS is 20 characters long and costs a rupee to send, that would translate to about Rs50,000 per megabyte. As opposed to this, my DSL connection allows me to download up to 500MB per month at a cost of only Rs1,000. In other words, the telecom network is approximately 25,000 times as expensive as the internet.
Perhaps the most remarkable attribute of the internet is that nobody seems to know who runs it. Our only experience of authority is our Internet Service Provider, who may be lazy and may maintain poor service levels and security. Or he may be authoritarian and may prevent access to certain services.
Most people, however, do not perceive the ISP as a serious problem, and if they do, they usually can switch to a better one. But other than the limited role that the ISP plays, who governs the internet?
That most people are completely stumped when asked this question, indicates how well the internet is run, and cheaply at that. The governments and international bodies seeking to take charge of the internet would do well to learn from the model of governance that the internet practices, instead of seeking to thrust their obsolete models of centralized control and command on it. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.
Problems of the internet
This is not to suggest that the internet doesn’t have problems:
— Poor countries pay for traffic in both directions, when connecting to rich countries like the US;
— We all receive far too much junk mail or spam;
— There are too many viruses and worms floating around the internet.
That the ITU has not been able to sort out even the first problem is an indication of how little genuine problems of the internet seem to matter to it. Asymmetric bandwidth pricing is hardly such a problem which couldn’t be resolved following some negotiations and the setting up of local, national and regional bandwidth exchanges.
Spam could easily be brought under control, if governments were to hold ISPs liable for the spam emanating from their network. The same, I would submit, would work for viruses. A few fines and ISPs would quickly tighten their security.
There could be a couple more genuine problems that don’t occur to me at the moment, but other than that we have a bunch of red herrings.
The red herrings
Foremost among these is the discussion over domain names and who should control them. Internet traffic is routed using IP addresses, similar to phone numbers on the telecom network.
People came up with the clever idea of allowing people to use groups of alphanumerical characters, instead of these large numbers, with computers automatically making the conversion. Such a big deal should not be made about who uses which name to represent a specific IP address, and frankly, most of us don’t care. We just use google to find whichever company or individual we are looking for.
Many issues being brought into the internet governance discussion relate to support for the internet — how different segments of society may be helped to get onto the internet? That is fine.
It is to be welcomed if international organizations and governments engage in this. But for that, they don’t need to govern the internet. Likewise, governments see in the internet, ways of better interacting with the citizens and becoming transparent. Again, this is welcome but this can be achieved without anyone taking over the internet.
Governments and conservative members of society would like to see pornography and other objectionable material on the internet curbed and controlled. However, all these years we have been exposed to this uncontrolled information and the sky hasn’t fallen over our heads.
Another reason put forward to justify the involvement of governments and international institutions in internet governance is to promote a different direction for its growth, so that it better addresses the needs of the disenfranchised.
Again, this is a red herring. The internet basically is nothing but a large number of computers talking to each other in a language called TCP-IP. This language merely allows reliable communication between any two computers on the network.
What the two computers do with this facility is entirely up to them, just as you can use the telephone to talk business or to gossip. Just because you want to start a different kind of conversation on the phone, doesn’t mean you need to take over the phone company, particularly when it is taking no steps to censor you.
How is the internet governed?
My objective is not to discourage interest in internet governance, but how does one get involved? Arguably the only significant governance the internet enjoys, is that of bodies like the Internet Engineering Task Force. These people manage a process that ensures that the internet keeps acquiring new abilities at a furious pace, which leaves policy-makers and the legal system far behind. The bureaucrats at international decision-making bodies, such as the UN, must be wondering how it maintains this speed, in a process that is remarkably inclusive, consensual, and transparent.
When presented with a problem, and conflicting suggestions for improvement, the IETF doesn’t take decisions in favour of one approach or the other. If even after thorough discussion, there is a difference of opinion on how a certain objective is to be achieved, all variants can be tried, without fear of doing any serious damage.
In characteristic modesty for an engineering body, the standards that the IETF encourages the internet to follow are published as “Requests for Comment.” If after some experience with all the variants, one stands out, a new RFC pointing this out supersedes the earlier one and the discussion moves on to other objectives.
I strongly feel that the civil society needs to be sternly telling the UN that there are more important problems in the world for it to tackle than internet governance. Surely international organizations themselves value the internet as they benefit greatly from the ease with which it allows information to be shared.
The internet is akin to the goose that lays golden eggs. Tinkering with it, without a sound understanding of goose biology, could be disastrous.
The writer
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