Nominet is canvassing support for a crucial Net governance vote that it says will help prevent government regulation of Britain’s dot-uk registry.

The company has just published a series of resolutions to be put to a member vote at an Extraordinary General Meeting on 24 February in London. The resolutions will see several significant changes made to Nominet’s structure, including a larger Board, lower voting thresholds, explicitly recognising that Nominet has a “public purpose”, giving the Board the right to set pricing, and a promise to review the organisation’s current membership setup to pull in more of the Internet community into its decisions.

In a letter announcing the EGM, Nominet’s chairman Bob Gilbert pleaded with members to vote to keep the government out: “Without significant membership support, the Government has expressed its intention to intervene and regulate Nominet and the domain name industry. The result will be increased red tape and the erosion of members’ business interests.”

He continues: “If your view of Nominet is that ‘it just works’ and you are happy with the way we operate and the services we provide for you, then it is crucial you express that support with a positive vote on the changes we are proposing.” The reason for the hard-sell is Nominet’s traditionally extremely low voter turnout: most members pay the membership fee just to be able to buy their dot-uk domains wholesale and have little interest in its day-to-day operations.

The changes have already met with public support from a number of other key Internet organisations, including ICANN, the Internet Society (ISOC) and Afilias (registry operator of dot-info, among others). The “Father of the Internet” himself, Vint Cerf, has also chimed in, saying that the changes “will produce a more agile and public-oriented institution”.

If accepted, the changes would bring to a close a very difficult few years for Nominet. It was nearly four years ago that Nominet lost all of its resolutions at a similar EGM – the organisation’s first attempt to modernise its governance structure in the face of a rapidly changing registry market. The company licked its wounds and came back to narrowly win two changes at a second EGM in November 2006.

But while reconsidering how to update its structure, the company was then pulled into a difficult and unpleasant Board fight, then eventually ended with the resignation of two Board members. And the combination of the failed EGM and Board fight, led to the UK government getting involved: first warning in a letter [pdf] that it expected Nominet to make changes soon, and then a year later writing into the upcoming Digital Economy Bill the right to take over the company.

Nominet responded with an independent governance review, a canvass of its members and then a a double roll-out of suggested governance changes. First, the company produced a Statement of Commitments, listing what its aims were and asking people whether they agreed with the principles (95 percent of respondents said they did). With that backing, a series of proposed resolutions were published and members again asked for their opinion. Nominet hasn’t said what, if any, feedback it received from this second round of public consultation, but it has now put out the formal resolutions and announced 24 February as the day when they will be put to a vote (online voting closes on 22 February).

Nominet’s Board is hoping that the very real threat of government intervention, and their efforts to engage directly with members on the changes will get the votes in. It will only become clear at the end of this month whether they have been successful.

With my book out the way, I now have lots more time to, er, read books. And one of those near the top of the pile was Who controls the Internet? by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu. The book has frequently cropped up in conversations with various Net people since it was published in March, and so I have been itching to read it.

I finished it this morning. And my gut feeling is that this is a very important book. Not only does it cover a big hole in knowledge and understanding of the Internet, but it is also well written, easy to understand, concise, coherent and thoughtful. I strongly suspect it will be ones of those books that informs opinion and so has a lasting, global influence far beyond what you could expect from 226 pages of text.

Being a journalist and knowing a thing or two about the subject though, I also have a number of criticisms. It has a dangerous US bias despite its avowed international outlook, it completely misses a fundamental plank of Internet governance, namely ICANN, and it has missed recent changes that will come back to haunt it.

But first of all, let me say that I think this book should be read by everyone that has an interest in Internet matters. In fact, I would argue it should be a text for students not only of the Internet but also international law, relations and politics and perhaps even the more pragmatic end of philosophy.

Buy it from Amazon.co.uk, or Amazon.com or if you’re like me, pop into the Oxford University Press shop on Oxford High Street to get it.

Rundown

Why the big sell? Because it tells the story of the Internet in a simple, interesting and relevant way. Obviously not the full Internet story. But what it does manage is not to get bogged down, and – something that books from the academic community consistently fail to do – uses real-people examples to make wider points accessible and understandable. In fact, the book is journalistic in its style – something that the authors could very likely view as criticism but is fervently meant as praise.

What immediately struck me was how far the authors – Jack Goldsmith, professor of law at Harvard and a former high-ranking government lawyer, and Tim Wu, professor of law at Columbia Law School – had dived into the extraordinarily deep well of Internet experience.

I struggle to think of one important, precedent-setting example of how the Internet has affected society that has been missed by Goldsmith and Wu. I was immediately impressed that they had discovered and researched A Rape in Cyberspace, a 1993 article in Village Voice by Julian Dibbell. The article was I think probably the first that opened up alot of people’s minds to what this Internet thing might become, why it was so different to what had gone before. It was the rallying text for a hippie style of thought over cyberspace – one that was unique but has largely fallen under the feet of a pragmatic human race, much as the hippy philosophy did in the 60s. As soon as A Rape in Cyberspace turned up in this book, however, it was obvious that the authors had grasped some of the more intangible, and less legal, elements of the Internet.

Telling it how it is

It gave the Yahoo Nazi case (where Yahoo was forced to block access to Nazi memorabilia on its US website for French Internet users) the focus and importance it deserves. Even though it didn’t dig into the cases themselves, by mentioning Barcelona.com and JK Rowling (two remarkable examples of disputes over ownership of particular domains), it was clear that Goldsmith and Wu had researched far beyond what appears in the book. And this research has lent an indefinable weight to the book which in turns encourages trust in the threads it draws and the conclusions it reaches.

What are those conclusions?

Very broadly, the main argument is that the Internet is a medium like any other and as a result, national governments and national laws *will* have their way with it. And the lesson to learn is that this is not necessarily a bad thing.

This of course flies in the face of the majority of Internet culture and thinking up to this point, but it comes at an absolutely crucial point in the history of the Internet – a point where the lines of future government control and influence are being drawing up through the United Nations. By pointing out the big lies (that were always there) about governments not being able to control content or interaction over the Internet, and by doing it in a non-aggressive or preachy way, this book could well be the appeasing text between government and technologists that helps both sides understand why the other has a point.

It puts an end to the lie that it is only China or Saudi Arabia that are evil filterers of Internet content by pointing out that Google constantly filters information within the United States. It shows the full range of greys in freedom of speech, albeit with China in the dark grey area. It makes entirely commonsense arguments about people’s sovereignty and cultures, but arguments that nonetheless aren’t heard or understood in the West, leading to the peculiarly American Internet fantasy that the Internet will somehow bring US-style freedom and democracy to the rest of world simply by existing. It won’t, it was never going to, get over it, is what the book effectively says, although in far more diplomatic and fair language.

America, America

And here of course I have strayed into the great dangerous America issue. It is particularly unfortunate for the Internet that the United States of America has embarked on an extraordinary and frequently baffling period of confused nationalism at a time where it still retains control of the Internet in so many ways.

In fact, while Goldsmith and Wu never answer the question that is the title of the book – who controls the Internet – the answer is written right through the book. The answer is America.

Despite a brilliant summary of different scenarios across the world, and despite its avowed international perspective, the book comes with a very strong US bias, and that invariably means big business. The examples are all how changes in the Internet have affected US interests. The French government/courts decides against Yahoo; the Australian government/courts decides against the Wall Street Journal; the Indian government/courts decides against eBay.

The book tackles the social conceits and fantasies borne through the early US-centric view of the Internet but it doesn’t stretch beyond that to look back the other way, to see what the rest of the world is doing with the Internet. The one exception to this is a brilliant and perceptive rundown of China’s approach to the Internet. Yes, China has built an enormous and highly sophisticated fltering mechanism for its Internet, but that hasn’t stopped an explosion in its use – and its uses. Many Chinese now have a everyday grasp of technology that puts everyone else – including the West – to shame. But even though the book still views China through the eyes of someone longing for American values, it recognises that different systems have different advantages and disadvantages.

Of course, in some senses it is an unfair criticism of the book to say it is too US-centric because it is that very approach that makes the book so powerful. America is in control of the Internet right now, and it has to be persuaded to slowly take its hands off the reins to prevent the rest of the world going their own direction. As such, a book like this, which intelligently and carefully points out the realities of the Net to Americans could be a vital tool in expanding understanding and knowledge in an increasingly polarised society. That is why Who controls the Internet? could well become an historic and defining text.

ICANN

But this US perspective, and its academic roots, does result in one glaring and ironic omission. And that is the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers, known as ICANN.

There is a strange cabal of US academic thinking at the moment that ICANN is not relevant to what goes on on the Internet. Despite being a not-for-profit US company based in California that oversees the Internet’s main directory and decides policy for domain names, and a company that is ultimately owned and run by the US government, American academics – with the exception of Milton Mueller – have effectively given up on ICANN.

The theory is that ICANN is no more than a symbol of power – the king’s golden crown – which governments fight over while failing to realise that the real influence of the Internet is what goes on over the Internet. You don’t get excited about who runs the telephone system, so while ICANN is currently in the midst of an international power struggle, it will eventually just become an exchange system and so is not worth concentrating on.

I think this is startlingly short-sighted and academia will come to regret it. Despite covering every other element of Internet control, possibly the most significant and certainly the most controversial area of it is given only four pages in Who controls the Internet? It is so concise, it reads like a Wikipedia article.

It is extraordinary that so many intelligent and imaginative minds cannot see why this organisation will become fundamental to the future of the Internet. There are frequent high-flying essays at the moment over how the domain name system (DNS) will become increasingly irrelevant. For one, programs like Bittorrent ride on the Internet, rather than use the DNS per se. And secondly, search engines like Google mean that domain names themselves aren’t important – what’s important is content.

Failing to learn the lessons

When I hear this I hear overpowering echoes of the earlier philosophies that this book does so much to dispel. The Internet was going to override all governments and laws, the cyberspace pioneers predicted. Rubbish, says this book. The Internet will make it impossible to restrict free expression, was the argument. Sorry, already happening, the book points out.

I say the same to those who argue that the DNS is going to be irrelevant. It is foggy thinking. While you are using Google to undermine the DNS – where do you go? Google.com. How do you find bittorrent files? You go to a website – located by its DNS – to find links to them. There simply isn’t another self-reliant system that run on the Internet outside the DNS.

But more than that – what do people will think will happen when more and more top-level domains are introduced (as they are going to be)? People point to the poor take-up of new top-level domains such as .info or .biz but this is again ludicrously shortsighted. New top-level domains will give people the opportunity to devise new ways of using the Internet **run over a TLD**. For example, the mobile phone companies now own .mobi. They now have their own chunk of the domain name system that they can run entirely differently to what we are used to. They could, for example, write new code that links directly with the next generation of mobile phones: no need to use the browser system we have grown used to. It could well become the mobile Internet because with your own entry into the DNS, you don’t have to follow the same philosophies as defined by the dotcom model.

The huge growth at the moment is in sites like MySpace (note: found at myspace.com). But it isn’t your space, is it? It’s space that a company at MySpace.com gives you because people don’t know who to set up their own websites. Is it possible to give everyone their own actual space? Theoretically yes – but only through the DNS.

And who decides not only who runs these top-level domains, but also how the DNS is used and what new top-level domains are allowed to exist? ICANN.

The other glaring area of importance is IP addresses. Even if you assume that the DNS will become only one of many Internet uses, I have yet to hear anyone argue that they can do without IP addresses. And who is in charge of allocating IP addresses? Who defines the policy surrounding IP addresses? ICANN.

Choke-point

ICANN is stood right in the middle of the future possibilities of the Internet and yet most of the people telling grand tales of barbie dolls and new ways of communicating have failed to see what is right in front of their face. The control point – and potential choke-point – that is ICANN.

There is another very important element of ICANN as well that is frequently missed by Internet commentators. The idea is that ICANN is just something for governments to squabble over. And yet, if Who controls the Internet? tells us anything it is that, no matter how much you believe you don’t want to mix with governments, you do not have a choice. Governments *will* define how the Internet works in future whether you like it or not.

So, rather than ignore the one organisation that everyone is fighting over, it should be obvious that this is the organisation that needs to be focussed on, because whatever happens to it will have far-reaching effects across the world and billowing into the future.

What I see as the failure of Goldsmith and Wu to properly research this area – led, I am certain, because of a deliberate decision by the US academic community reviewing the Internet to give ICANN a miss – has also led to them missing a fundamental change in the control not only of the Internet but also of a wider power shift in society itself.

What has come out of the ICANN model and the numerous battles fought, and continuing to be fought, has been a new model of power-sharing and decision-making that could well change society as a whole. Anyone that has been following Internet Governance issues will immediately recognise it in the endlessly repeated phrase “multi-stakeholder”.

The future of control?

Put simply, governments have realised that business and civil society are vitally important as almost-equal partners in dealing with the Internet. Governments have learnt very slowly through the course of the World Summit on the Information Society process that not only do they not have the answers to many of the problems they wish to solve but that unless they listen to business and civil society their solutions will not be effective. In short, governments needs other people to be able to do what they want. Legislation is often too slow and ineffective in a highly flexible Net environment.

It is a remarkable change that led to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan himself pointing out that the Tunisia World Summit was the first to ever welcome in non-governments as almost-equal partners. The United Nations men most at the heart of the Internet Governance issue, Markus Kummer and Nitin Desai have frequently commented on how different the government interaction is over the Internet. And the Internet Governance Forum, given no more than a sentence in Goldsmith and Wu’s book, is an experiment that, if it works, could see the philosophy of multi-stakeholder meetings take root right across government, right across the world.

The lasting legacy of the Internet could be that societal control – something that this book so clearly demonstrates cannot be removed or wished away (nor should it be) – becomes the territory of not solely government, but a blend of government, business and civil society, with government given the casting vote.

Now, this is very unsettled waters and of course it is my philosophy at a time when the IGF hasn’t even been held, so you can hardly blame Goldsmith and Wu for not loosening up their taut, concise and persuasive approach to include the very wishy-washy spaced-out philosophy that they do so much to pull apart, but I do believe the failure to properly review ICANN in this book is its Achilles Heel, and hope it is corrected in what I’m sure will be future editions to make this a classic text.

That said, it is by far my favourite book about the Internet (exempting my Sex.com book which is tastier in parts, but isn’t published yet), and I implore everyone to buy it and read it. It gives great clarity in what is frequently a confusing and emotive sphere of modern life.

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Update (18 Sep): I’ve been looking for other reviews of the book and have eventually stumbled over two good ones, following a series of poor ones. Both come from Syracuse University, one from Milton Mueller, an Internet governance expert, and the other from John Mathiason, the university international relations professor.

I’d say that Mueller and I are broadly of the same mind, although he makes some stronger critical points [pdf] about the presumption that national governments as is will take control of the Net. His is also a more scholarly review.

Mathiason provides a much more knowledgeable version [pdf] of my complaint about the book’s US centricity, pointing out basically that Goldsmith and Wu don’t seem to understand how the rest of the world works. I only have the reviews as pdfs I’m afraid.

Buy Who controls the Internet? — UK | US

Less than a week after 87 percent of Net experts went out of their way to tell the US government that it needs to internationalise its role as overall authority for the Internet root, another shot has been fired over its boughs by two insiders.

A paper [pdf] put out by Becky Burr and Marilyn Cade pulls no punches when it states that it provides a “concrete pathway for eliminating one of the most sources of contention in the ICANN debate – the United States’ retain, exclusive and unilateral authority over the Internet’s authoritative root”.

In case you don’t know Becky Burr is the woman that originally wrote most of ICANN’s founding Memorandum of Understanding back in 1998 when she was a DoC lawyer. And Marilyn Cade has been a fundamental cog and powerbroker in ICANN since its inception to the extent that she is on Paul Twomey’s exclusive and secretive President’s Strategy Committee.

The paper makes four arguments which it “urges” the US government to follow. I will summarise them below, but do check out the paper itself here.

1. Make a statement saying it will not use its authority to undermine any ICANN decisions, and that it will make VeriSign make changes to the A root in 14 days.
2. Set up an international working group to take over its role which will comprise top-level government officials from across the world (not the existing GAC members, it suggests)and ICANN officials. It then suggests the powers and role this group might have.
3. Restate and provide assistance in getting back to the initial ICANN principles where private ownership is respected and ICANN’s technical role is limited
4. Force some accountability onto ICANN by making it review its procedures and appeals mechanisms

Speaking from a personal perspective, I have to give this paper some serious thought as to where the potential future problems could be, but my gut feeling is that it deals with everyone’s concerns and represents a pragmatic way out of the ever-looming problem of how the USG and ICANN work and interact.

Governments have to have a final-say role – but it has to kept specific and it has to be kept sharp (i.e. have no way to endlessly delay an issue). Something similar to the new model that is being touted for the UN’s Security Council. At the same time, private ownership has to be respected and strengthened because without that, the Internet would quickly descend into power politics and nothing would get done.

But ICANN can only be given this role if it is forced to build decent accountability and appeals processes, as well as allow more representation from everyday Internet users.

We shall see what everyone else makes of this, but I see that the Internet Governance Project is already smiling on it.

I have finally finished my analysis of the 632 comments sent to the NTIA following its Notice of Inquiry over the continued role of ICANN as Internet overseer, and it’s going to come as a shock to the US government.

A remarkable 87.3 percent of comments that discussed the USG’s role said it should transition itself away from complete control to a more international body. ICANN fared little better: 63.4 percent of comments about it varied from critical to downright hostile.

Yes, I have bothered to go through every single comment, read every single word and do an analysis. The only analysis I didn’t do (and which now I cannot summon the energy to do) was to find out what percentage of the comments came from which region (mostly inside the US and outside the US) – so if someone wants to…

What’s the upshot? Everyone wants the USG to hand over control. Many of those in support were clearly from people that didn’t know what they were talking about – the same sort of blind patriotism that we saw during the World Summit. But there is no mistaking that everyone agrees that the USG has to get on with this.

I hope to god that people in the DoC have a masterplan for transition and recognise why they should do it because this topic is going to get out of hand very soon. I understand that governments are going to try to pressure the USG again at the ITU meeting in September – away from the prying eyes of the world’s press. And there is the risk that the IGF will also be sullied if the DoC doesn’t offer the world something.

Spam

Of course alot of the comments were unusable and if anyone is to blame for this, it is me. Of the 632 comments (there were eight repeated emails), 153 were about Net neutrality, and 174 were about, well, I don’t know what some of them were about. Lots of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” style nonsense, lots of “keep the Net free!!!”.

But what was usable was good. Some of it really good. If I had to pick out two to read, it would be the Internet Governance Project’s response and Network Solutions’ response. Every knows Milton Mueller’s views but there is some expansive and innovative thinking in there too – particular his suggestion of adding two principles to ICANN’s basic charter: freedom of expression, and accountability.

Network Solutions’ response is a very thorough piece, almost academic. It concerns itself slightly too much with the VeriSign dotcom contract issue for obvious reasons, but it is still a very useful document, particularly because it attaches Becky Burr’s testimony the other day to Congress as an exhibit. (It also includes Michael Roberts’, which caused me to think: where is Mike Roberts these days?)

There are lots of other interesting responses too. I started making a list but when the list got past 20, I decided I would highlight only two.

Support? What support?

What is noticeable however is that support for ICANN and for the USG is not easy to find. There are some words of support pointing out especially the e-IANA decision and the ccNSO rules changes – but these are very, very recent changes and it really smacks of BBC charter renewal time.

[Quick background: the BBC has a charter with the UK government which is renewed every 10 years. Every 10 years, when it is up for renewal, the BBC is suddenly very nice to the government, it always announces a restructure and across-the-board cost-cutting and makes lots of noise about what a great service it provides. Then, as soon as the charter is renewed, it bloats out again and starts criticising the government.]

Items of interest:

• Syria’s plan for a new Internet governance structure – anyone want to take a bet on this?
• Karl Auerbach is always a good read
• Danny Younger goes into some depth about Internet issues and ICANN
• A mildly bizarre suggestion to use sea laws for international Internet problems
• George Sadowsky gives a broad-scope perspective

Apart from that, here are my stats in case anyone wants to take issue with my methodology.

Basically, I split comments into:

• Pro-ICANN (supportive)
• Anti-ICANN (critical)
• Pro-USG (should stay in charge)
• Anti-USG (should not stay in charge)
• Anti-USG (from the IGP boilerplate)
• Net neutrality
• Random (unusable in this inquiry’s context)
• Whois
• Domain names
• .xxx

I noted down what each comment’s primary point was and if there was a strong secondary point. As such here are the figures according to my calculations, with the secondary points in brackets:

• Pro-ICANN: 24 (6)
• Anti-ICANN: 44 (8)
• Pro-USG: 26 (4)
• Anti-USG: 98 (9)
• Anti-USG (IGP): 99
• Net neutrality: 153
• Random: 174
• Whois: 4
• Domain names: 8
• .xxx: 2

This means that 51.7 percent of comments were not relevant to the inquiry. That 2.2 percent of comments were about specific issues. That 67.7 percent of all relevant comments, and 87.3 percent of comments that mentioned the USG role were against the USG maintaining control. That 8.9 percent of all relevant comments, and 12.7 percent of comments that mentioned the USG role were for the USG maintaining control.

That 15.1 percent of all relevant comments, and 63.4 percent of all comments that mentioned ICANN’s role were critical or not supportive of ICANN. And finally that 8.3 percent of all relevant comments, and 36.6 percent of all comments that mentioned ICANN’s role were supportive of ICANN.

Any questions, queries or comments, please comment below.

I’ve written a piece for The Register which went up this morning about Nominet having to deal with a US company surreptiously data-mining the Whois details for .uk domains to use in their products.

It’s an interesting story in that it highlights something that most people are really very unaware of, plus helps outline the risks we face in not building sufficient privacy laws with digital technology. Nominet is a rare example of a main Net registry that provides a minimum of Whois information about domain owners and also has an opt-in to remove all information except your name.

This system about thanks to two Australian con-men a few years ago taking the entire Whois for .uk domains and then using it to send people letters telling them they had to pay extension fees to keep their domains. It was a scam, but one that 50,000 Nominet customers were fooled by.

That isn’t my main point however. My main point is that while under European law, the Whois data is copyright and therefore protected, under ICANN rules, all global top-level domains – which means all dotcoms, dotnets, dotorgs etc – have to make all people’s contact details publicly available, and that means home address and telephone number and email address.

I’ve always liked this because as a journalist I’ve been able to get in touch with domain owners very easily and quicky, but for years these easily accessible details were the databases that spammers used to make everyone’s lives a misery. And alot of the scammers. These databases are still out there and are still used.

Fortunately, registrars started putting protections on accessing this information. With most Whois databases now, you are given a wobbly representation of numbers and letters to manually type in to get the information, thereby preventing automated scripts from simply dragging the information of the servers.

But (and I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a month), the GNSO part of ICANN voted in a new definition for what the Whois can be used for in March, which will restrict the information that will be displayed to just the name and maybe the email address – with home address and telephone numbers pulled out.

It has still to get past the ICANN Board, but it has been a long, lengthy and drawn-out battle in the Internet community – three years in fact – to finally get there, despite massive privacy concerns from day one.

Milestone

I believe the change is much more significant than just the Whois though. What it represents is the Internet hitting another milestone in its maturity as a medium. The Whois rules as they currently exist came about thanks to the unusual history of the Net. When all the rules for how it would work were being decided, it was a pretty scrappy discussion. But there was one group that was highly organised, highly focussed and, well, aggressive and overbearing.

They were, of course, lawyers. Intellectual Property lawyers. As a result this group managed to distort a huge number of basic Net rules in their favour, including the frankly ridiculous rule that a person’s entire contact details for a domain name be made freely and publicly available.

Well, it’s all turning back now. The Net is of such importance that these bad rules are being written out. The medium has become integral to our lives and the mini-powerbrokers’ era is over. The Whois is one important step on that path.

The biggest and most important step is still to come however. And that will be reform of the domain name arbritration rules. That will be a big battle. But I for one will be at the front waving years of stories about how utterly corrupt the UDRP rules are, with WIPO the online equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition.

People probably won’t notice when that day comes, in much the same way that they won’t notice when the Whois changes, but these are the things going on under the surface that are making the Internet the great global medium it is.

[I'm only glad I don't live in the US - where big business is shamefully trying to turn the Internet in a controlled space. Somewhat ironic. But I will write more of net neutrality later. If you are interested, the best source of information I would say was Susan Crawford - check out her blog.]