EOW May 2014

Transatlantic Cable

Questions of security Those mechanisms are at the core of the opposition view on the US withdrawal. Some American o cials – concerned that authoritarian governments might stage a takeover of the Web and impose online censorship – have warned about the dangers of ceding ICANN’s authority to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations agency. Politico published some early reaction to the announcement: † Daniel Castro, a senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington-based non- partisan think tank, warned in an op-ed that ICANN would not be held accountable without US control. He wrote: “If the Obama Administration gives away its oversight of the Internet it will be gone forever.” † “Every American should worry about Obama giving up control of the Internet to an unde ned group,” tweeted former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a failed presidential aspirant in 2012. “This is very, very dangerous.” The response in the US was not uniformly negative. Senate Commerce Committee chairman Jay Rockefeller hailed the government’s decision to relinquish oversight of the Internet’s critical functions, calling it “the next phase” in a transition to “an independent entity that re ects the broad diversity of the global Internet community.” † For its part, NTIA denied that its action was taken in response to the Snowden disclosures, asserting that the relationship between the Commerce Department and ICANN was always envisioned as temporary. Mr Strickling set out a series of principles that must govern the transition, including the preservation of a free and open Internet. † As reported by Erin Mershon and Jessica Meyers of Politico, ICANN recently embarked on a controversial expansion of the Internet’s domain-name system, preparing to approve hundreds of new Web endings (eg .clothing, .shop, .hospital) over the next year. Industry groups have criticised the programme, saying it will increase the potential for cybersquatting and add to their costs. Clearly, ICANN is working to project a more international vibe, having announced last year that it would open new hubs in Singapore and Istanbul. And it has been emphasising the global aspects of its domain-name expansion, which will introduce new non-English Web endings in Cyrillic, Chinese and Arabic.

Telecom

The news that custodianship of the Internet is to pass out of US hands is welcome to some; to others, not so much The 14 th March announcement by the National Tele- communications & Information Administration (NTIA) that it is relinquishing its hold on ICANN marks a dramatic change for both the US Commerce Department agency and the Los Angeles-based group that manages the Internet’s architecture. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has, since 2000, performed critical back-end web work, including management of .com and other domain names, under a contract with Commerce. The NTIA administrator, Larry Strickling, said that the United States will give up its Internet oversight role in the Autumn of 2015, upon expiration of the current contract with ICANN. The function will thereupon be turned over to an international group whose structure and administration is to be determined over the coming year. The Strickling announcement stoked a controversy that had been simmering for some time but which blazed up on 15 th June, 2013. On that date, rogue National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden commenced periodic leaks of classi ed material relating to the NSA’s wide-ranging surveillance programmes. It would be di cult to overstate the polarising e ect of these datadumps both in the US and in the wider global sphere. For some interested parties, notably ICANN, which craves the status of global organisation out from under US supervision, the announcement came as unquali ed good news. It also gladdened European Union o cials, who post-Snowden had intensi ed their activities in the campaign against the US as custodian of the Internet. In February the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, issued a call for “a clear timeline” for globalising ICANN and the duties it performs under the US contract. And here it was. Joining Mr Strickling in a 14 th March conference call with the news site Politico (Arlington, Virginia), ICANN president Fadi Chehade was in full hail-and-farewell mode. “We thank the US government for its stewardship, for its guidance over the years,” he said. “And we thank them today for trusting the global community to replace their stewardship with the appropriate accountability mechanisms.”

Image: www.bigstockphoto.com Photographer Zsolt Ercsel

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May 2014