Leaders | Internet governance

The road to surfdom?

The internet is not American, whatever Ted Cruz thinks

WHOEVER controls the internet’s address book has the power over life and death on the network. Delete a domain name (economist.com, for example), and a website can no longer be found and an e-mail no longer delivered.

Such authority currently falls under the auspices of America, but not for much longer. On October 1st the federal government is scheduled to let lapse a contract that gives it control over part of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body that oversees the internet’s address system. Some—notably Ted Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas, who seems willing to risk a shutdown of the government to block the transfer—argue that this amounts to giving away the internet. He says that the handover would allow governments in autocratic countries such as China, Iran and Russia to have greater control over what is available online. In fact, the opposite is true.

It was the American government that helped bring ICANN to life in 1998, to avoid having the internet overseen by a UN-type intergovernmental organisation. Instead, it pushed for a “multi-stakeholder” model, which gives not just governments, but all involved—including engineers, network operators and even internet users—a say. Because there was no precedent for this kind of organisation and because of a fear that ICANN would lack legitimacy, America reserved to itself the right to veto changes to the internet’s master list of addresses, but promised to pull back once the new entity had proved itself.

When ICANN was created this set-up made sense: the internet had a strongly American flavour and most of its users were American. But now most netizens live elsewhere—China and India are home to the greatest number of them—and most traffic no longer passes over American cables. Following revelations in 2013 that the National Security Agency had spied on internet users around the world, pressure grew for America to fulfil its pledge and relinquish control. In 2014 the government in Washington, DC, duly said that it would do so, provided that ICANN was truly independent and that it was able to resist power grabs by other governments and commercial interests. After ICANN agreed to implement a number of reforms earlier this year, the Obama administration decided to give the organisation full responsibility.

It is right to do so. The internet is meant to be global. But it is at risk of splintering, whether as a result of national firewalls or rules mandating that certain types of data need to be stored within a country. Russia’s new data-localisation law, which came into effect on September 1st, for instance, requires that personal information from Russian citizens is kept in databases located in Russia. America’s withdrawal from its oversight role at ICANN will not stop the likes of China and Russia from trying to impose their own rules on their patch of the internet. But it will remove an obvious excuse for them to demand an even greater say in how it is run.

In contrast, blocking ICANN’s independence would weaken the consensus-driven model that has propelled the internet forward. The thorniest issues related to the internet, from cyber-security and hate speech to international data flows, are a complex mixture of the political and the technical. ICANN has its flaws, not least its hyper-bureaucratic processes, but it has shown that the multi-stakeholder model can solve tricky problems such as creating new suffixes for internet addresses. Almost 1.1 billion websites are currently online; global internet traffic will surpass 1 zettabyte for the first time this year, the equivalent of 152m years of high-definition video.

Yes ICANN

Mr Cruz may well fail to block the handover at the end of this month. But legal uncertainties would remain: Republicans could try to block the transition process in court, forcing the American government to take back control of ICANN (Congress has previously passed spending bills that prohibit the administration from spending any money on it). That would be the wrong fight to pick. Blocking ICANN’s independence would not save the internet but hasten its Balkanisation.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "The road to surfdom?"

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