Supporters of the United Nations Global Forum want ICANN to relinquish its ties to the US government and become a multi-nation, multi-lateral organization with UN oversight. Those within the United States who oppose ICANN want the organization to be more transparent and to make the domain registration system a competitive field. What is the best solution for ICANN? A de-regulated, free-market DNS system where entrepreneurs compete with one another to register users. Allowing the United Nations to get involved in Internet governance would only make the Internet another area for policy disputes between member nations where politics would corrupt the process, as Audrey Selian and Kenneth Neil Cukier of Harvard argued in their paper, "The World vs. the Web: The UN's Politicization of the Information Society." UN Internet governance would simply be a transfer of the status quo from the United States Department of Commerce and the ICANN Board of Directors being cogs in the system to the United Nations leaders.
Created in 1998 at the behest of the Commerce Department on the orders of then President Clinton, ICANN still retains ties to the US government and its policies, processes and methods are kept secret. Its board of directors, according to Lucas Mast of the Cato Institute, does not consider Internet users and entrepreneurs in their decisions. In the article "Internet Star Chamber" Mr. Mast explains why most citizens are unaware of the government role concerning the Internet. The world wide web's meteoric expansion into homes, offices, and schools over the past decade has led most to believe that it is a "model of free-wheeling capitalism" when in reality, the most important decisions are made by and "old guard, protectionist" group with a ".gov mentality."
The complicated web between ICANN, the Department of Commerce and powerful Washington interests becomes even more tangled when the connection between ICANN and the powerful firm Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). In a 2002 interview with Salon.com, John Gilmore, a former SunMicrosystems employee and co-founder of Cygnus Software, explained how SAIC, a multi-billion dollar company owned by its employees and the holder of classified military contracts with the government, bought the small company in charge of the temporary monopoly of being the registrar of the top level domains (TLDs), Network Solutions for a paltry $3million. After the purchase, the U.S. government announced that the annual fees domain name holders pay would increase. According to Mr. Gilmore, who has set up his own registry, it costs a registrar "less than 25 cents per year per name to run." After hiking the price, SAIC took the company public, capitalizing on the Internet boom, and then sold the Network Solutions subsidiary off before the dotcom bubble burst to VeriSign Inc. for $21 billion.
Critics on both sides of the issue agree that the government is too involved in a non-governmental concern and that issues such as trademarks, new technology and innovation and country domain names should not be left up to the U.S Commerce Dept. However, they disagree on how to handle the issue.
At the Global Forum on Internet Governance, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan announced his intentions to establish a "working group on Internet governance" to help spread the influence of the world wide web into countries that have not yet benefited from it. This decision is based on the outcome of the World Summit on the Information Society held in Geneva last December, organized by the International Telecommunications Union, a UN sponsored group. At the Geneva meeting delegates from throughout the world decided:
"International Internet governance issues should be addressed in a coordinated manner. We ask the Secretary-General of the United Nations to set up a working group on Internet governance, in an open and inclusive process that ensures a mechanism for the full and active participation of governments, the private sector and civil society from both developing and developed countries involving relevant intergovernmental and international organizations and forums, to investigate and make proposals for action, as appropriate, on the governance of Internet by 2005."
In effect, the meeting at UN headquarters was Secretary-General Annan's acknowledgement of their request.
In the Cato Institute publication TechKnowledge, authors Adam Thierer and Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. argue against UN control of the Internet, mainly because since the information superhighway has been expanded to consumers across the world, free speech and global commerce have increased greatly, bringing benefits throughout the world. They argue:
"The great advantage of the Net is precisely the ability to reach as many people as possible and overcome artificial restrictions on trade or communications at traditional geographic boundaries...the United Nations appears eager to assume greater control over the Net, not because of its failures but because it undermines members' authority."
Clearly, there are countries where poverty and human rights abuses abound, where Internet access is restricted, freedom is suppressed, and living conditions are abysmal. Putting the United Nations in charge of Internet governance will not remedy these problems, and to use the so-called "digital divide" as a pawn in overall policy disputes between the more- and less-developed countries of this world is a fruitless effort. While the UN is in the right to criticize ICANN for its ties to corporate interests, its proposed solution is incorrect. In order to eliminate special interests from any problem area, politics must be removed from the situation as well. In order to remove politics, there must be competition, and to ensure competition, no one country or organization should control the decision-making of Internet registrars.
