Democratic Structures in Cyberspace
Domain Name Policy - Internet Governance
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Domain Name Policy - Internet Governance
One may question why the Internet needs governance at all. It seems that the very idea of governance is opposed to the independent philosophy of the Internet. Certain functions of the Internet must, however, be coordinated. Most notable among these are the management of the root database and the assignment of IP addresses. The Internet architecture was created wholly by engineers, and its design process was free from explicit political considerations. It is therefore unsurprising that the Internet was designed without levels of hierarchy and points of monitoring and control. The design philosophy of the Internet has always aimed at accommodating heterogeneity, which has lead to its distinct, flat architecture, completely unlike an earlier network – the public switch telephony network – in which calls must go through central switches. Technologically, the Internet can “run itself” and there is no real need to have a governance structure at all. There are several organizations that take care of the development and operation aspects of the Internet, but they do not have absolute authority to impose rules on netizens. Participation on the Internet is a freely made, individual decision. There are no strict social norms to encourage anybody to use the Internet, but we may find contexts in which Internet access has importance for certain groups of people, like MIT students or class members of 6.805121. The Internet is distinctly unlike the telephony system, in which it is assumed that everyone should be able to access to a telephone. In developed countries, a telephone number is also a piece of identification essential for applying for credit cards, jobs or even a supermarket discount card. In America, owning an email account is no longer a privilege enjoyed only by academics or advance technology agencies, but it is still not a method of communication widely adopted by the general public. The public accessibility of the Internet is worse in developing countries, where Internet access is confined to groups of elites and government officials. During the deployment of telephony systems, countries like the US had tremendous government involvement in both policy design and technical implementation of the process. The old AT&T was a special arm of the US government, and their policies were tightly hinged on government decisions. In the deployment of the telephony network, the US government played an important role in fostering the process. They subsidized individuals who could not afford a telephone and ensured that all households would have access to telephones. The idea here was to provide universal access to the general public. The Internet differs from the PSTN telephony network both in terms of policy and technology. Historically, in the development of the Internet, the US government has not played much of a decisionmaking role. There have been several organizations that separately take care of developing the Internet. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) designs and develops protocols for the Internet, and it has been the technical arm of the Internet. The IETF works tightly with the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) which is responsible for technical management of IETF activities and the Internet standards process. There is also the Internet Architecture Board who is responsible for defining the overall architecture of the Internet and providing guidance and broad direction to the IETF. As mentioned before, participation on the Internet is totally voluntary; these organizations merely set standards for the community and ensure interoperability of the Internet. The Domain Name System is managed by the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA). Before his death, Dr. Jon Postel, of the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California, ran IANA. IANA manages the root of the DNS to promote stability and robustness. This role primarily consists of making decisions about the location of root name servers, as well as considering the qualifications of applicants seeking to manage country code top level domains. These core organizations maintain and ensure the stability of the Internet. They are rarely involved in political decisions concerning the Internet. While they have thus far been the governance group of the Internet so far, they have little power outside of their tasks. This has been, so far, a form of minimal governance. This mode of minimal governance has existed since the beginning of the Internet. The relative absence of governance has fostered a cultural norm of freedom on the Internet. Moreover, most net users have not even noticed the existence of what minimal governance structures do exist. The only organization noticeable to users has been the company that contracts out domain names to the general public. One may wonder why the Internet, such an enormous interconnected networks, has so little central power and a lack of bureaucracy and governance. In answering this question, we have to trace back to the creators of the Internet - Internet engineers. Bureaucracy, power struggle and control of people are rarely a priority in engineers’ decisions. They were tackling a technical problem, which in their minds, was a question of how to increase participation in a fair and equal way. The idea was to maximize an individual user’s utility in participating on the network by letting more users participate into the network, thereby taking advantage of network externalities. The Internet was not designed originally as a profit-making vehicle or with any explicit political purposes. There were no coded constraints on participation, and the costs of participation were low.
In the early days of the Internet, the protocol TCP/IP, which is required to connect to the Internet, was given out free. The only prerequisite was to be able to install the protocol to your computer and have network access; hence, the cost to participate was low.122 The French Minitel system provides a starkly different, contrasting model in participation. The Minitel network was developed by the French Government in order to provide digital user directory services. In many aspects it is very similar to today's Internet, but it was first deployed in 1982. The design process of Minitel was different from that of the Internet. The deployment of Minitel was centralized and controlled completely by the French Government. Its network standard is highly proprietary, and it required a special terminal to run the service. In the early days of Minitel, the terminals were given out for free by the government, but they were only given out to elite, targeted groups. Minitel is a technology that had been used for almost a decade before web technology was invented. Both the web and Minitel offer similar kinds of services and interfaces, but Minitel has never grown to become a common standard, especially outside of France. The French government has protected the technology and they have not shared the technology freely with other countries. As mentioned before, the prerequisite to run Internet was the acquisition of a copy of TCP/IP and a network computer. These low barriers to entry allowed the Internet to spread rapidly throughout academia and out into the general public in the past decade. The US Government decided to commercialize the Internet in 1992, without altering the concept of open participation. The TCP/IP protocol can still be obtained at no cost. Nowadays, the only requirement for joining the Internet is a personal computer with network access from an Internet service provider. The installation process has also been simplified greatly since it was first developed. In most developed countries, the cost of buying an Internet connection is relatively low; therefore, the Internet is widely used as a medium for communications. We have come to take this freedom of joining the Internet for granted, and most people do not realize that it would not be the same if the Internet were controlled by a government. This is a cultural and social norm that has been shaped by technology and the people who created the technology. Most Internet users who use the web everyday hardly notice the governance structure of the Internet. In this web culture, there are no governments and no restrictions, as well as a freedom of expression limited only by the Internet’s social norms. So, in addition to the ease of Internet participation, this non-restriction concept also attracts many people to join the Internet. The Internet is a space where one can gain a freedom not available in real space. It is a space in wihch anyone can meet, exchange ideas and form a community.
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