At the World Summit on the Information Society last month, government delegates decided once again to leave control of the Internet in the hands of the Americans.
The United Nations, which sponsored the summit, was not happy. Member states, mostly developing countries, are concerned the American vision of the Internet will limit their use of this powerful tool.
Their fears may be justified. Big business is pressuring the U.S. to change its laws to make the Internet more friendly for e-business. Since most of the physical infrastructure of the Internet is located in the U.S., changes to American law affect the entire world, giving the U.S. the power to decide who can use the Internet and how they use it.
This is unacceptable. We need an international governing body for the Internet to make sure it remains accessible to all and is not dominated by unilateral law.
A Californian NGO called The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers controls the overarching framework of the Internet, under the administrative eye of the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Simply put, this means the American government regulates the Internet by, to make an analogy, deciding where roads lead, where new ones can be built and who can drive on them. It also means a majority of intersections, and the rules which control them, are in the U.S.
So far, the rules of the road have been very open. This is an extension of the liberal tendencies of the Internet’s original university and non-profit sector administrators. But it might not always be like this.
The free construction of roads and assignment of licences – to keep our analogy – has resulted in two extremes: the net is full of spam and hackers, but it has also become a breeding ground for progressive ideas and developments.
For example, the open source movement began when Netscape decided to allow any user to build upon its browser in 1998, and then pass on their changes and additions for others to build upon.
Programmers soon invented the concept of “copyleft” to keep their creations free for all. “Copylefted” material is copyrighted material with special terms of distribution attached to it that prevents people from selling it or making money off anything derived from it.
Linux, an operating system comparable to Windows, along with Firefox, a popular Internet browser, and Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, are all results of open source projects and are sometimes more broadly used than their expensive counterparts.
Open source software has numerous benefits – from creating completely transparent and populist tools for e-governance to allowing free access to powerful software and information to individuals in developing countries.
Corporations like Microsoft are, predictably, unimpressed. In 2004, Microsoft began calling on the U.S. government to regulate open source technology and ensure the authority of copyright on the Internet. It remains to be seen whether America will respond with restrictions.
The Internet has been doing fine as a free zone, and has flourished under this freedom. An international body will help keep it that way.
If rules need to be created for the Internet it is better that they are the product of international agreement, and not the agreement of a private corporation’s board of directors.