Net Compromise in Tunis

Continued from page 1

How is it that an agreement was reached after 20 months of bitter debate since the first round of the UN summit in December 2003 in Geneva? Mainly, because it was expedient. Even before the 12,000 delegates and 50-plus heads of state arrived for the summit's November 17 opening, it was apparent to every country that there was no way to settle the issue. So the best that all governments could obtain would be a way to continue discussions further in a forum all felt comfortable with.

For other countries, that meant "not ICANN." For the United States, which stood almost entirely alone in its position on retaining oversight of ICANN, it meant any venue that had no powers and in which ICANN would not be the only issue on the table.

In the end, all sides went home with something. But the victory may ultimately prove a Carthaginian peace for the Internet itself, which risks getting scorched in the process.

Consider the very negotiations themselves: the penultimate sticking point was a single word. Nations of the world could not agreed on whether a new way to manage the Internet's underlying technology might be created "if" justified (as the United States wanted), or "when" justified (as Iran urged, supported by Saudi Arabia). After a 30-minute diplomatic debate, the ever-pragmatic British broke the impasse -- and so Point 61 of the 122-point document uses the term "where" justified.

The distinction makes no practical difference, but the debate was deeply revealing. It showed the rigidity of the 19th-century nation-state system colliding with the 21st-century ethos of the amorphous, ever-evolving Internet. It was just the sort of thing that the United States wanted to avoid when it created ICANN.

Indeed, American control over the Internet's addressing system is useful, because the country has taken a largely hands-off approach that other governments might not follow, and because it has ensured that the Internet's structure reflects American values -- not so much those of G.I. Joe, but of Woodstock-era hippie academics.

That is not to say that some sharing of power is not called for -- it is. Under the current domain name system, countries do not have complete sovereignty over their two-letter country codes (like .fr for France). The US acknowledges that these suffixes should belong to the respective countries, and the agreement last week in Tunis insists on it. This will take time to happen technically but eventually will.