The lack of consensus on a new International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) treaty at the recent world conference in Dubai centred on key differences in attitudes to internet governance. India was one of about 80 countries that refused to sign the new ITRs, which would have given national governments more control. At present, the internet runs on centralised addressing administered by a California-based NGO, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. It manages the Domain Name System, assigning DNS names and Internet Protocol (IP) addresses to all websites, and is funded by the US Department of Commerce, a legacy of the internet’s origins as a US defence research project in the 1960s. Given the US’ strong constitutional free speech commitment, it is difficult to prevent content being placed online. The current architecture doesn’t merely enable free information exchange. It also enables transactions, including barter and virtual currencies. Governments can block specific Web addresses. But such blocks are easily avoided. Thus, the internet has been a rallying ground for protesters in the Arab Spring, in Iranian demonstrations, Tibetan agitations and the ongoing Syrian civil war.
The new proposal would have allowed governments to assign addresses and control content from within respective physical borders. Ostensibly this would help deal with spam. But it would have inevitably led to walled national intranets, with curated content and rigidly monitored ingress-egress — more stringent monitoring of surfers and censoring of content. The 90-odd signatories and the 80-odd naysayers divided neatly along ideological lines. The group gunning for more internet controls included China, Iran, the UAE and various Arab regimes, Russia and sundry Central Asian and African republics. The US, UK, Canada, Australia, India and other pluralist democracies opted to retain the current structure.
It was heartening that India, which has passed laws restricting free speech online, rejected the proposed ITRs. Perhaps the concerns of the Indian IT industry, which joined ranks with its global peers to lobby for the present system, counted for something. ICANN will, therefore, continue to administer the internet. However, the global telecommunication system now continues to run on the basis of a 1988 agreement. That was before HTML, before broadband, before mobile telephony. So there are lots of grey technical areas. For example, there are over 650 million websites, and every surfer must also be assigned an IP address while online. This has prompted a shift to IPv6, a new addressing standard, which allows for a much larger number of unique IP addresses. At some stage, ICANN may be overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the task and the question of control will arise again. Then there are the concerns of telecom operators, who face dropping margins due to internet telephony and would like a share of the revenues that Google, Amazon, Facebook et al generate. At some stage, such issues will have to be faced and the answers may lead to another round of disruptive changes in the global economy. But that’s a free-market solution, far better than letting a faceless bureaucrat in Beijing or Harare nip incipient protests in the bud simply by labelling them “spam”.
