liquid culture

What power does the US have over the Internet, really?

Rasmus Fleischer reflects upon a current hot topic; the expected continuation of US government authority over the global DNS system.
At least two news stories have focussed on the question regarding the power over the Internet, more specifically the power over the Domain Name System (DNS). Partly, the German music monopoly GEMA is trying to force ISP’s to encumber the accessibility of sites connected to the eMule/eDonkey file-sharing network.
And partly, the US government has announced new principles, aimed at ‘ensuring stability and security’ of the global DNS, through ‘maintaining its historic role in authorizing changes or modifications to the authoritative root zone file’. In other words, the US government thereby refuses to hand over the control of the DNS to the non-profit ICANN corporation, as had been generally expected when the current contract is due to expired next year. Even less so, the US agrees to hand over control of domain names to the UN. Instead, all indications are that ICANN shall continue having responsibility only of the sheer technical management of the DNS. This has clearly upset several commentators, especially those voices being (allegedly) regarded “anti-American” and “anti-Bush”.
On the anti-Bush site Daily Kos, speculations are running wild:

Just as China would prefer not to let their people wander outside the Chinese portion of the net, I suspect the Bushies would prefer to keep Americans under their control and prevent us from being polluted with all those evil "French" ideas that are out their.
That said, having control over the root zone files gives the US a great deal of control over who can interconnect to "our" network.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The idea that control over the DNS root would give free hands for censorship is not correct. The Internet is a dynamic system that relies on standards and protocols, not on laws. Although protocols should not be equalled with “democracy”, the fact remains that the standard that most users adhere to has “won”, regardless of what the authority behind the losing standard claims.
On Slashdot, commentaries are written like; “let's start up our own DNS servers and let the US isolate themselves as they choose”. Which works, yes – in theory. The only authority in the DNS root is in humans/computers freely adhering to a unified system for transforming domain names to IP addresses. Effectively, it is illusory to think that anyone could start alternative domain name systems at wish, which is pointed out in another commentary; “It's like saying there is nothing prohibiting people from forming an alternative government, holding cabinet meetings in a garage. It's pointless unless people accept it, and sadly the only way to achieve acceptance is to press it through politics.”
But still – to the extent that the DNS authority ruins the Internet, the users will accordingly leave it behind, empty its authority of real content and point their browsers to other DNS servers instead.
Dana Blankenhorn on Corante.com examines “Balkanization” of the Internet as an actual and valid risk. This, for example, if UN organs would dismiss the US authority and construct an alternative DNS root. The result would then be two different ways of connecting domain names to IP addresses; strictly speaking, two different Internets. And if two, why not more? “China could establish its own DNS and thus simplify its Great Firewall by not having pointers to any site its leaders don't approve of.”
On the other hand, though, there is not actually anything that would stop China from doing this today.
Obviously, the choice remains to stay within the globally established standard, the one administered by ICANN under the authority of US government. To do anything else — that is, to try create national (isolationist) managerial tools for Internet standards and not only filter out unwanted pages — would basically be to say no to the Internet full stop and take the Northern Korean path. The struggle over (plural) Internets is, as we see, fought with anything but free hands. It cannot be compared to, say, The Soviet Union’s control over print presses. The alternative to press the “off” button does not exist. And no filters or DNS overthrows in the world control more than just the peaks of icebergs, since the www is merely one piece of the Internet.
Thus, there are no reasons to speculate about the “downfall of the Internet”. Especially when talking about the strategies of GEMA (introduced above) of manipulating DNS to block out certain domain names – to circumvent this is ridiculously easy. In the words of Oscar Swartz:

Obviously, knowledgeable users can dodge these tricks through, for example, utilising pure IP numbers rather than domain names. The IP addresses to relevant sites could be spread around the world on countless blogs, thanks to the effort of sympathising bloggers. The users could also set their computers manually to use other DNSs than their own provider’s, that is, non-tampered ones.

The German CCC (Chaos Computer Club) has published a simple guide (in German) to getting round these censorship ploys. This due to an several year-long, still ongoing legal process, where the federal government of North Rhine and Westphalia has demanded 80 local ISPs to block out two Neo-Nazi domains through DNS manipulation. Does GEMA really think that they can stop file-sharing through taking this domain name route against the today already outmoded eDonkey network?
It also has become clear that their letter of warning was signed with the names of several German musicians that were not at all agreeing on these methods, among them the front person of the popular group Wir sind Helden. The anti-piracy antics of the music monopolists is losing the plot more and more, and they still continue to do it in the names of music makers that obviously do not agree with these strategies.
Earlier this spring, Henrik Pontén, spokesperson for the Swedish “Anti-Piracy Bureau” (Antipiratbyrån) joined this rhetoric, arguing in woolly language for filtering out file-sharing-related activity on the net. Still we have not received any further explanation of what is really meant by this.

Originally published by Rasmus Fleischer 12/07 2005 on Swedish blog Copyriot.

posted by Jonas Andersson @ 5:17 pm