Who Controls the Internet? review

Wendy M Grossman ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 13 Sep 2006

Most people didn't think much about how the Internet was governed before 1996. In fact, most people thought it wasn't governed at all: they called it lawless and anarchic, like the Wild West. That wasn't, of course, true. Even in its earliest days the Internet had people in charge. Generally speaking, they were the engineers and researchers who had built the thing, and who continued to serve as more or less benevolent dictators with input from many sources. Their public acceptance stemmed from their years of trustworthy behaviour and stewardship.

Everyone has their own idea of the moment when this began to change. In this excellent history and analysis, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu choose the passage of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which many Internet pioneers viewed as a direct attack on their community. Others might choose 1993, when the Acceptable Use Policy was removed and the Internet was opened to commercial traffic, since that made it inevitable that 'outsiders' would seek to gain control. Or even 1990, when the series of arrests that Bruce Sterling profiled in his book The Hacker Crackdown led to the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation to defend civil liberties in cyberspace and the first Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, which began many serious efforts to negotiate the Internet's future.

It's certainly true that 1996 was the last gasp of the old fantasy that the Internet was independent of terrestrial governments -- a view most publicly expressed by Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow in A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace that most people found embarrassing. In 1997, a collection of the founding engineers got together at the International Telecommunication Union to put together a memorandum of understanding on the future of the domain name system, and were surprised to meet criticism from all sides. Wasn't this the way they'd always done things? The US government squelched the idea, and after a little demonstration of the power of the Net gods by Jon Postel, ICANN was born as a compromise.

As Goldsmith and Wu see it, four kinds of law can govern the Internet: technology and architecture (as in the domain name system); global law (such as the cybercrime treaty, collecting dust faster than it's collecting signatures); WTO-imposed resolutions of trade disputes (their example is Web-based gambling); and national law that is exported (such as Europe's privacy laws or the US's First Amendment). None of these kinds of law will ever have a perfect ability to block all unwanted behaviour. But, they argue, they don't have to be: like the laws that govern our physical world, it's enough to eliminate most of the problem.

Yet, since nations don't agree on what control there should be, what's happening is the development of multiple Internets whose architectures are designed in accordance with different sets of values. Distance and geography are not dead. The Internet will do as much to kill globalisation as it has done to support it. If Goldsmith and Wu are right, the Internet that businesses will be operating in will look very different than anyone thought.

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