Freedom isn't Free... and neither is the Internet

In 2005, the liberal bleeding-heart brigade were still mostly a-hollerin' and a-complainin' about the illegal war of aggression against some tin-pot dictatorship in the Middle East and the subsequent rape, plunder and torture that killed some 100,000 of its people. Don't they understand that "stuff happens", all fair and balanced journalists ask themselves.

Nevertheless, you could be forgiven for being a little shocked to hear that while that was going the United States had quietly annexed cyberspace. Yes, all of it. I know, you'd think someone would've noticed! But no, not until a few days ago was The Register (motto: biting the hand that feeds I.T.) kind enough to inform us that due to technical difficulties in annexing cyber-Iraq, 2005 was the year the US annexed cyber-everywhere.

The US invented the Internet. An idealistic plaything of academics to begin with, it eventually and indeed spectacularly blossomed and a key step in its meteoric rise was convincing the international community to get onboard with the idea. Even now there's little but inertia stopping them developing their own reliably internationalist alternative. The promise made was that the organisations managing the Internet would be independent and would govern in the best interests of the international online community, despite being based in and largely funded by the US.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) "is an internationally organized, non-profit corporation" responsible for coordinating the names and numbers behind every address and domain name on the Internet. We know that they're not just a branch of the US government because the job used to be done by a government authority called the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and now it's not. See how the names are different, reassuring isn't it.

But a shift began in July 2005, at the height of Bush popularity and "screw the world" hubris, as can be seen in this Register report. Assistant secretary at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), Michael D. Gallagher, tucked four new US principles regarding the Internet into the end of a presentation. These can be paraphrased as follows (1) The Internet is ours (2) Governments can do what they like on their part of the Internet (3) The Internet is ours (4) You may talk about changes to the way the Internet works, especially if it's in a market and business focused way. Which sounds pretty bullying, and yet:

"...what is most disturbing about Gallagher's presentation, is how it endlessly refers to the president. The first slide has a picture of George Bush. The second begins "Thanks to the president's policies, America's economy is strong". The next slide is "The president's broadband vision". The next slide leads with a quote from Bush and two pictures of him. And on and on it goes. There is barely a single slide that doesn't quote from the president."

It's doubtful that the president knows what the Internet is, but apparently it's on his radar and all he knows is it belongs to him and he plans to keep it that way.

Specifically, what the principles mean is that ICANN, the US government puppet organisation, will continue to rule the Internet instead of the previously agreed handover in September of this New Year to an international body, probably the UN's International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

Surely that "puppet organisation" crack is a little over the top, you'll say. Just James being hyperbolous? No. That's where the more recent news comes in: a month after the US declared that it had annexed cyber-space ICANN used that declaration to justify grabbing control of two country domains (aka Top Level Domains, aka TLD's, e.g. ".au" for Australia). Based on the second 'principle' - that Governments should control their country's TLD - ICANN took .kz from the independent organisation of Kazakh internet community members, who were running it before, and gave it to an agency of Kazakhstan's despotic government who promptly censored www.borat.kz off the web because they objected to Ali G making fun of them.

So what, you ask? If Bush wants to hand censorship powers over to some dictatorial regime in Eastern Europe to keep them happy it's not that big a deal. After all most countries do deals with China and look the other way regarding Tibet and thousands of other human rights violations. Even Yahoo! does that, helping China track down pesky independent journalists and have them imprisoned for years on end.

That's as may be, because scratching Kazakhstan's back was just a diversion. At the very same meeting ICANN cited .kz as a 'precedent' to justify taking control of Iraq's internet domain .iq and handing it over to the US regime running Iraq. Originally, because ICANN was supposed to be neutral and purely technical, it would only switch control of a country's domain if both parties were in agreement. Now it has decided, with the help of George Bush's wisdom, to judge for itself who is supposed to be in control of the domain in a given country.

In a strange coincidence it turned out that under previous ICANN rules the US would've found it hard to take control of .iq after it arrested the owners of the organisation previously running .iq and sentenced them to 10 years jail for a crime usually punishable with a fine. No such problem existed when the US annexed Afghanistan because they bombed the current TLD owner out of existence while bombing Kabul back to the stone age. They couldn't have had the same good fortune with Iraq's TLD owner because he lived in Texas.

* Note: part of the problem is just the ICANN bureaucracy's craven preservation and expansion policies, including putting a 25c to $2 tax on domain name transactions this year. A world tax for the new world government?

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