Dr. Peng Hwa Ang gave a lecture titled "Who's Really Out To Control the Internet? UN and U.S.A. Internet Governance" at Hamilton on Oct. 26. Dr. Ang is the dean of the School of Communication and Information at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, as well as one of 40 persons appointed by Secretary-General Kofi Annan to a UN Working Group on Internet Governance in 2004. He spoke about the current international efforts to create a multilateral, transparent, and democratic method for Internet governance, as well as why it is in the United States' best interest to relinquish some control over the Internet.
Dr. Ang began by asking, what is the root of the problem of Internet governance? "The root of the problem is the problem of the root," he said, referring to the root zone file that is central to the internet's domain name system. This root zone file, which is how computers find websites using their domain names, exists in the server of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is headquartered in Marina Del Ray, California.
ICANN also oversees the creation and maintenance of top level domains (such as .com, .edu, or .net, as well as country codes such as .uk or .us). Though ICANN is a non-profit corporation, it also has a sole-sourced contract with the U.S. Government, working directly under the Department of Commerce. Ang said that this arrangement leads other countries to be concerned because the U.S.A has the power to affect their internet domains. If a nation, such as Iran, were in conflict with the U.S., Ang said, it is possible that the root zone file (.ir for Iran) could be deleted.
The international political issues surrounding the governance of the internet were first addressed at the 2003 World Summit on Information Society (WSIS), Ang said. Conflict and disagreement at the 2003 WSIS led to the call for a UN Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG), to appointed by Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Dr. Ang was one of 40 persons chosen by Annan to make up the group. The goal of this group, Ang said, was to evaluate the adequacy of current internet governance arrangement and to make recommendations for how the system could be changed to make it more democratic, multilateral, transparent, and multi-stakeholder.
Ang discussed the main issue areas the WGIG addressed. The first, the problem of the physical infrastructure of the internet, was the most "hot-button political issue," according to Ang. The WGIG also dealt with issues of internet use and abuse and the potential development aspects of the internet. In the end, the working group made several recommendations, which Ang discussed. They recommended a regular forum for stakeholders in internet governance to meet and discuss issues. They also made several recommendations about the internationalization of oversight, which amounted to a call for the U.S. government to give up some of its sole rights to control the actions of ICANN.
The result of this working group report and the subsequent second meeting of the WSIS in 2005 was the creation of the international Internet Governance Forum. Ang will be attending the first ever meeting of this forum in Athens, Greece next week. Also, the U.S. government made a promise not to use its power over ICANN to control other countries' top level domains, though there is no mechanism for enforcing this promise. The overall result of these agreements, according to Ang, is a "slippery slope toward decreasing the power of ICANN" and towards the internationalization of internet governance.
Why should the United States honor its promises and let internet governance to become internationalized? Ang said that if the U.S. continues to behave as if it owns the internet and related technologies, it could spur other countries to create parallel systems, and this would ultimately hurt the United States' position of dominance in the market. If the U.S. allows other countries some control over the internet, however, Ang believes this will keep the nation at the center of internet technology and governance, and that this will be best for the U.S. in the long term.
Dr. Ang's lecture was sponsored by the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center, the Dean of the Faculty, and the Department of Communication.
-- by Caroline Russell O'Shea '07
