Are you worried that if we give up this domain jurisdiction weve had for all these years well lose Internet freedom?"
By Robert Romano
Texas Insider Report: WASHINGTON D.C. Whatever you think our countrys done wrong the United States has been by far the country most committed to
keeping the Internet free and open and uninterrupted and a lot of these people who say they want multi-stakeholder
control over domain names and Internet access
what they really do is want the ability to shut down inconvenient exchanges within their own countries"
said former President Bill Clinton.
The former president was leading a panel discussion on March 21 at the Clinton Global Initiative at Arizona State University making the case against the U.S. shifting regulatory authority over Internet Protocol (IP) addresses the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and the domain name system (DNS) to some as of yet unnamed international body.
Hes right.
This critical authority governs the functions that link numerical IP addresses to easy-to-remember domain names and guarantee that when you type in a domain name youre not getting some fraudulent site or getting blocked.
The Commerce Department announced on March 14th its intent to transition that authority overseas after some 45 years of federal control first via
the Defense Departments ARPANET and then
the National Science Foundations NSFNET before the contracting of the IANA to
the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 1998.
Clinton was responding to claims that in light of the National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance scandal the U.S. should cease carrying out the IP address and DNS functions in favor of some sort multistakeholder" approach composed of governments overseas private Internet foundations and other interested parties.
Not so fast says Clinton who warned A lot of these so-called multi-stakeholders are really governments that want to gag people and restrict access to the Internet."
Joining Clinton on the panel was Jimmy Wales co-founder of Wikipedia and Internet freedom advocate who Clinton asked Are you worried Jimmy that if we give up this domain jurisdiction that weve had for all these years that well lose Internet freedom?"
Wales responded Yeah Im very worried about it" noting that the U.S. Constitution serves as a firewall against censorship by ICANN as a contractor of the Commerce Department.
There is the 1st Amendment in the U.S. and there is a culture around free expression and thats so strong that its really important" Wales said.
Hes right too.
Should anything go awry under the current Commerce-ICANN relationship vis a vis censorship right now there is a recourse in federal court. That is a really important point to make in this discussion.
Wales declared support for keeping the Internet free and open despite whatever oppressive governments overseas may want to do with it.
Im on a high level panel at ICANN discussing this issue and one of the things that really concerns me is some of the other people on the panel when they talk about you know its important that we have respect for local cultures."
He continued Okay I respect local cultures but Im not sure if that means I think you the head of the telecomm regulation unit in a particular country should be banning parts of Wikipedia. Thats not local cultural variation that we should embrace and accept thats a human rights violation."
Right now thats something neither
ICANN nor the Commerce Department can do because in the U.S. it is clearly against the First Amendment.
Yet if the Commerce Department transitions the IP address and DNS authorities without any vote in Congress to an international agency like the United Nations International Telecommunication Union (ITU) or a series of private Internet
foundations like ICANN and the Internet Society these essential 1st Amendment guarantees will go away.
And we wont get them back. Then the incidences of censorship Wales warns against could rise not only overseas but also become prevalent even here in the U.S. breaking with the Internets early tradition of embracing the freedom of expression.
Although both Clinton and Wales expressed nominal support for the multistakeholder approach in principle they expressed grave doubts about how it would look in reality.
As Clinton noted Weve kept the Internet free and open and its a great tribute to the United States that we have done that including the ability to bash the living daylights out of those of us that are in office or have been weve done that."
He added A lot of the people whove been trying to take this authority from the United States wanted to do it for the sole purpose of cracking down on Internet freedom and limiting it."
Clinton is correct. And there is simply no reason to take on such an unwarranted risk of censorship and one that could be global to boot.
The multistakeholder model will never produce anything close to as effective or binding as the First Amendment and federal judicial oversight. Together they act as a powerful disincentive to any abuse of the IANA and DNS functions by ICANN and that is not something we should give up lightly.
Robert Romano is the senior editor of Americans for Limited Government.
