2005: The year ICANN and the US controlled the internet

**pigeonmeister** · 01-06-2006 10:59 AM

Not sure if this topic has come up before, although I suspect it has. I am talking specifically about the control of the ever-troublesome redelegation process for country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) - like .uk for the United Kingdom.

There are currently 246 ccTLDs in existence (although there should really only be 240), and every year, there are arguments over who should be entitled to run them. Mostly ownership of the domains is stable but in recent years African governments have been keen to take more of a role in running their country's Internet, causing a glut.

This year, 2005, there have been seven redelegations: The Falkland Islands (.fk); Hong Kong (.hk); Iraq (.iq); Kazakhstan (.kz); South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands (.gs); Timor-Leste (.tl); and Tokelau (.tk).

Of these, three were agreed to before July and are of little consequence, being no more than agreed changes in owner or country circumstances. Gues which ones I am going to focus on though!

On 28 July 2005 at a special board meeting of internet overseeing organisation ICANN, ownership of both Iraq (.iq) and Kazakhstan (.kz) was changed in a way that soon after saw a change in ownership for South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands (.gs) and Tokelau (.tk).

At that meeting, consciously and for the first time, ICANN used a US government-provided reason to turn over Kazakhstan's internet ownership to a government owned and run association without requiring consent from the existing owners. The previous owners, KazNIC, had been created from the country's Internet community.

ICANN then immediately used that "precedent" to hand ownership of Iraq's internet over to another government-run body, without accounting for any objections that the existing owners might have.

Previously it had always been the case that ICANN would take no action (and only ICANN, through IANA, can actually change ownership of a ccTLD) unless both sides were in complete agreement. Now, ICANN had set itself up as the de facto world authority on who should run different parts of the Internet.

ICANN switched control of the internet in one fell swoop to governments. And, of course, it puts itself in the role of judge. This is the phrase that has since appeared in every redelegation following the July meeting: "ICANN has reviewed the request, and has determined that the proposed redelegation would be in the best interests of the local and global Internet communities."

If a company running a country code top-level domain refuses to agree to hand over any information or data held by it to the government, either legally, illegally or extra-legally, secretly or not, the government can simply replace the company with a government-run agency. If it refuses to shut down a website, or to redirect it elsewhere, the government can simply replace it with a government-run agency.

It is a nuclear option, but neverthless a nuclear option that didn't exist prior to July. It will also never have to be used - the threat of its use will see any company wanting to keep hold of its livelihood agree to government demands. Agreement between a ccTLD operator and ICANN was now "desirable but not necessary to finalise a redelegation",

The obvious point to make is that now governments, if they don’t like websites appearing on their internet domain, can pressure the owners of that domain to remove it or just set up a govt agency to do it. Within months of the "Association of Kazakh IT Companies" getting control of Kazakhstan's internet domain, it shut down the website of British comic Sacha Baron Cohen (best known as Ali G). The site at www.borat.kz featured another of Cohen's comic creations, Borat Sagdiyev, a Kazakh journalist. It was removed from the Internet.

Why? The president of the organisation said it was so the comic "can't bad-mouth Kazakhstan under the .kz domain name". If you want an example of government-owned and run censorship on the internet, you'll be hard pushed to find a clearer example

Legal semantics

ICANN's efforts to turn itself into the Internet's government in this area stretch the phrase "redelegation" itself. Despite repeated requests by ccTLD owners themselves, it is ICANN that insists on calling the process of changing the name of the administrative or technical owners of a particular ccTLD "delegation".

The operators themselves prefer the terms "change of manager", "change of technical contact" and, in the case of more technical changes "change of name servers".

The advantage of the term "delegation" is that it has legal connotations. If you are delegating something, it automatically implies that the delegator has some form of legal authority over the delegee. This is something that most country code managers would strongly disagree with in the case of ICANN

Why did the US government allow this sleight-of-hand from an organisation that it has overall control over? Simple: Iraq.

When the US government took over Afghanistan in 2001, it was fortunate in that the current ccTLD owner was killed during bombing of Kabul. It simple forged the man's signature on a piece of paper handing over control to the US-created authority and the job was done.

Control of Iraq's domain was far more complicated however. The .iq domain was registered instead to two brothers living in the US. The Elashi brothers and other members of their family at the time were also in US jail awaiting trial for funding terrorists - which in the end amounted to shipping computer parts to Libya and Syria and for which they all received hefty sentences (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07...er_convicted/).

The US was keen to turn over Iraq's internet over the US-run administration but the whole process was political dynamite. Head of the temporary government, Paul Bremer, wrote to ICANN head Paul Twomey requesting ownership of .iq, but Twomey had to say it wasn't possible because the rules dictated that the Elashi brothers agree - something that was pretty unlikely. We only found out about that letter a year later however, and the letter does not appear on ICANN's website.

The situation infuriated the US administration which immediately sought to change how things were done. At the same time however, the US government could not be seen to be demanding that the .iq domain be handed over to whoever it said, because it would undermine its very position at the head of the Internet. It was also inevitable that any such move would attract media attention and criticism.

And so a method was devised by Washington and ICANN to ensure that the rules could be bent. And so they have been. As a result no one single soul is better off, and governments have been given control over the internet by the backdoor. To be fair I don't think the internet can ever be fully controlled, yet this (to me anyway) seems a bit worrying.

Related stories
Iraq domain owner convicted (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07...ner_convicted/)
All hail the new TLD - .ax (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/18/ax_domain/)
Niue is dead! Long live .nu! (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/01...ead_long_live/)
Bush administration annexes internet (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07...sh_net_policy/)

**RITFencing** · 01-08-2006 02:10 PM

Technically, no one controls the internet, although it originated in America (The US Army, actually; look up DARPANet.) The internet is just the hardware network that everything runs on; if you can make a device that will interface with it, you just added to the net. What you're talking about is the World Wide Web, which was developed in the swedish CERN research facility. The WWW is the software that runs on the net. Just a pedantic difference.

**Feltan** · 01-08-2006 03:02 PM

Originally Posted by RITFencing

...(The US Army, actually; look up DARPANet.)...

RIT,

You are correct. However, I don't need to look it up. I worked as an engineer developing ARPAnet; but, unlike Al Gore, I didn't do it all by myself.

Regards,
Feltan

**Epee_Pox** · 01-08-2006 03:27 PM

Pidge, that article has been cut-and-pasted all over the internet. And discussed everywhere, too.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but just a few months ago weren't the same sources, and the UN, and the EU all angry at the US for controlling the internet, and everyone wanted more involvment by individual governments? Now people are mad at the US for giving control of country domains to those individual governments. Talk about chutzpah.

**Epee_Pox** · 01-08-2006 03:32 PM

Originally Posted by RITFencing

... is the World Wide Web, which was developed in the swedish CERN research facility. ...

Swiss.

And by an Englishman.

**jeff** · 01-08-2006 04:09 PM

And that's Sir Tim Berners-Lee to us mere plebes.

Kudos to Epee_Pox. As flawed as ICANN might be (there are endless arguments about TLDs and monopolies and claims of all kinds of obscure shenanigans - very few of which do I attach much attention to) the current system works pretty damn well, and the parties Epee_Pox referred to moments ago have made noises about "controlling" the Internet, and letting individual countries manage access according to their individual rules. Which would mean things like Mugabe being able to censor (and sue) sites pointing out his brutality. We're better off as we are.

**Feltan** · 01-08-2006 05:22 PM

Originally Posted by jeff

...the current system works pretty damn well...

It should! It was designed to withstand nuclear catastrophe!

Regards,
Feltan

**jeff** · 01-08-2006 06:17 PM

Originally Posted by Feltan

It should! It was designed to withstand nuclear catastrophe!

Regards,
Feltan

Well, yes, it was designed to withstand large physical failures (eg: RIP permits dynamic routing around failed nodes and subnets). The biggest technology problems have been in different areas: Internet protocols use cleartext authentication (or none at all), so identity can be spoofed (want to send mail from 'god@universe.org'? It can be done. Are you sure that mail you've received is from who you think it is from, and hasn't been snooped or altered in flight? Want to force a DNS zone transfer?) , doesn't provide 'quality of service', can be subjected to denial-of-service attacks, and so forth. The original Internet assumed trusted parties, which aint the case now, for sure. Nonetheless, a monumental achievement.

What I meant was the current organizational system, which definitely did not have nuclear survivability in mind! And that's worked too, despite all kinds of problems like domain squatting. I'd rather leave it as-is than turn the Internet over to the tender mercies of (IMO) unaccountable and clueless political entities.

**pigeonmeister** · 01-09-2006 12:33 PM

Originally Posted by Epee_Pox

Pidge, that article has been cut-and-pasted all over the internet. And discussed everywhere, too.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but just a few months ago weren't the same sources, and the UN, and the EU all angry at the US for controlling the internet, and everyone wanted more involvment by individual governments? Now people are mad at the US for giving control of country domains to those individual governments. Talk about chutzpah.

I agree. To be honest my knowledge of the internet is nowhere near some of those on this forum, I apologise if this is old news. It was the Iraq dynamic that caught my attention and it is in this area that I worry about the most powerful country in the world having unilateral control of the world's most powerful global communication medium. I can see how the perception of this being another tool for US hegemony lingers- the problem is that it is very difficult to have, within this issue sphere, a serious debate at the present time. The bottom line is that, issues of American hegemony aside, the world and the internet would probably not be a better place (at this time anyway)
with the establishment of burdensome intergovernmental oversight or multinational treaties. I would doubt that the present system will remain for that long though.

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	Register Help Remember Me? Forum General Fencing Water Cooler Politics 2005: The year ICANN and the US controlled the internet Closed Thread Results 1 to 9 of 9 Thread: 2005: The year ICANN and the US controlled the internet Thread Tools Show Printable Version Email this Page… Subscribe to this Thread… Display Linear Mode Switch to Hybrid Mode Switch to Threaded Mode 01-06-2006 10:59 AM #1 pigeonmeister Senior Member Array Join Date May 2005 Location London, UK Posts 1,065 2005: The year ICANN and the US controlled the internet Not sure if this topic has come up before, although I suspect it has. I am talking specifically about the control of the ever-troublesome redelegation process for country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) - like .uk for the United Kingdom. There are currently 246 ccTLDs in existence (although there should really only be 240), and every year, there are arguments over who should be entitled to run them. Mostly ownership of the domains is stable but in recent years African governments have been keen to take more of a role in running their country's Internet, causing a glut. This year, 2005, there have been seven redelegations: The Falkland Islands (.fk); Hong Kong (.hk); Iraq (.iq); Kazakhstan (.kz); South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands (.gs); Timor-Leste (.tl); and Tokelau (.tk). Of these, three were agreed to before July and are of little consequence, being no more than agreed changes in owner or country circumstances. Gues which ones I am going to focus on though! On 28 July 2005 at a special board meeting of internet overseeing organisation ICANN, ownership of both Iraq (.iq) and Kazakhstan (.kz) was changed in a way that soon after saw a change in ownership for South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands (.gs) and Tokelau (.tk). At that meeting, consciously and for the first time, ICANN used a US government-provided reason to turn over Kazakhstan's internet ownership to a government owned and run association without requiring consent from the existing owners. The previous owners, KazNIC, had been created from the country's Internet community. ICANN then immediately used that "precedent" to hand ownership of Iraq's internet over to another government-run body, without accounting for any objections that the existing owners might have. Previously it had always been the case that ICANN would take no action (and only ICANN, through IANA, can actually change ownership of a ccTLD) unless both sides were in complete agreement. Now, ICANN had set itself up as the de facto world authority on who should run different parts of the Internet. ICANN switched control of the internet in one fell swoop to governments. And, of course, it puts itself in the role of judge. This is the phrase that has since appeared in every redelegation following the July meeting: "ICANN has reviewed the request, and has determined that the proposed redelegation would be in the best interests of the local and global Internet communities." If a company running a country code top-level domain refuses to agree to hand over any information or data held by it to the government, either legally, illegally or extra-legally, secretly or not, the government can simply replace the company with a government-run agency. If it refuses to shut down a website, or to redirect it elsewhere, the government can simply replace it with a government-run agency. It is a nuclear option, but neverthless a nuclear option that didn't exist prior to July. It will also never have to be used - the threat of its use will see any company wanting to keep hold of its livelihood agree to government demands. Agreement between a ccTLD operator and ICANN was now "desirable but not necessary to finalise a redelegation", The obvious point to make is that now governments, if they don’t like websites appearing on their internet domain, can pressure the owners of that domain to remove it or just set up a govt agency to do it. Within months of the "Association of Kazakh IT Companies" getting control of Kazakhstan's internet domain, it shut down the website of British comic Sacha Baron Cohen (best known as Ali G). The site at www.borat.kz featured another of Cohen's comic creations, Borat Sagdiyev, a Kazakh journalist. It was removed from the Internet. Why? The president of the organisation said it was so the comic "can't bad-mouth Kazakhstan under the .kz domain name". If you want an example of government-owned and run censorship on the internet, you'll be hard pushed to find a clearer example Legal semantics ICANN's efforts to turn itself into the Internet's government in this area stretch the phrase "redelegation" itself. Despite repeated requests by ccTLD owners themselves, it is ICANN that insists on calling the process of changing the name of the administrative or technical owners of a particular ccTLD "delegation". The operators themselves prefer the terms "change of manager", "change of technical contact" and, in the case of more technical changes "change of name servers". The advantage of the term "delegation" is that it has legal connotations. If you are delegating something, it automatically implies that the delegator has some form of legal authority over the delegee. This is something that most country code managers would strongly disagree with in the case of ICANN Why did the US government allow this sleight-of-hand from an organisation that it has overall control over? Simple: Iraq. When the US government took over Afghanistan in 2001, it was fortunate in that the current ccTLD owner was killed during bombing of Kabul. It simple forged the man's signature on a piece of paper handing over control to the US-created authority and the job was done. Control of Iraq's domain was far more complicated however. The .iq domain was registered instead to two brothers living in the US. The Elashi brothers and other members of their family at the time were also in US jail awaiting trial for funding terrorists - which in the end amounted to shipping computer parts to Libya and Syria and for which they all received hefty sentences (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07...er_convicted/). The US was keen to turn over Iraq's internet over the US-run administration but the whole process was political dynamite. Head of the temporary government, Paul Bremer, wrote to ICANN head Paul Twomey requesting ownership of .iq, but Twomey had to say it wasn't possible because the rules dictated that the Elashi brothers agree - something that was pretty unlikely. We only found out about that letter a year later however, and the letter does not appear on ICANN's website. The situation infuriated the US administration which immediately sought to change how things were done. At the same time however, the US government could not be seen to be demanding that the .iq domain be handed over to whoever it said, because it would undermine its very position at the head of the Internet. It was also inevitable that any such move would attract media attention and criticism. And so a method was devised by Washington and ICANN to ensure that the rules could be bent. And so they have been. As a result no one single soul is better off, and governments have been given control over the internet by the backdoor. To be fair I don't think the internet can ever be fully controlled, yet this (to me anyway) seems a bit worrying. Related stories Iraq domain owner convicted (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07...ner_convicted/) All hail the new TLD - .ax (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/18/ax_domain/) Niue is dead! Long live .nu! (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/01...ead_long_live/) Bush administration annexes internet (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07...sh_net_policy/) "There are no stupid questions, but there are a LOT of inquisitive idiots" 01-08-2006 02:10 PM #2 RITFencing Senior Member Array Join Date Sep 2005 Location Wherever I may roam Posts 5,163 Blog Entries 32 Technically, no one controls the internet, although it originated in America (The US Army, actually; look up DARPANet.) The internet is just the hardware network that everything runs on; if you can make a device that will interface with it, you just added to the net. What you're talking about is the World Wide Web, which was developed in the swedish CERN research facility. The WWW is the software that runs on the net. Just a pedantic difference. "If I were ever to challenge you to a duel, your best bet would be battle axes in a very dark basement." Misquoted from The Prisoner "Technical excellence is the antecedant of tactical creativity." - Nat Goodhartz But those things which belong neither to God nor to Caeser, feeleth free to writeth them off, for yea, they are deductable. 01-08-2006 03:02 PM #3 Feltan Senior Member Array Join Date May 2005 Location Mid-West USA Posts 616 Originally Posted by RITFencing ...(The US Army, actually; look up DARPANet.)... RIT, You are correct. However, I don't need to look it up. I worked as an engineer developing ARPAnet; but, unlike Al Gore, I didn't do it all by myself. Regards, Feltan 01-08-2006 03:27 PM #4 Epee_Pox Senior Member Array Join Date Feb 2004 Location ----> Posts 2,171 Pidge, that article has been cut-and-pasted all over the internet. And discussed everywhere, too. And correct me if I'm wrong, but just a few months ago weren't the same sources, and the UN, and the EU all angry at the US for controlling the internet, and everyone wanted more involvment by individual governments? Now people are mad at the US for giving control of country domains to those individual governments. Talk about chutzpah. Just because you have the right, that doesn't mean it is right. 01-08-2006 03:32 PM #5 Epee_Pox Senior Member Array Join Date Feb 2004 Location ----> Posts 2,171 Originally Posted by RITFencing ... is the World Wide Web, which was developed in the swedish CERN research facility. ... Swiss. And by an Englishman. Just because you have the right, that doesn't mean it is right. 01-08-2006 04:09 PM #6 jeff Senior Member Array Join Date Nov 2002 Location It's a dry heat Posts 6,686 And that's Sir Tim Berners-Lee to us mere plebes. Kudos to Epee_Pox. As flawed as ICANN might be (there are endless arguments about TLDs and monopolies and claims of all kinds of obscure shenanigans - very few of which do I attach much attention to) the current system works pretty damn well, and the parties Epee_Pox referred to moments ago have made noises about "controlling" the Internet, and letting individual countries manage access according to their individual rules. Which would mean things like Mugabe being able to censor (and sue) sites pointing out his brutality. We're better off as we are. "In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, theory and practice are different." 01-08-2006 05:22 PM #7 Feltan Senior Member Array Join Date May 2005 Location Mid-West USA Posts 616 Originally Posted by jeff ...the current system works pretty damn well... It should! It was designed to withstand nuclear catastrophe! Regards, Feltan 01-08-2006 06:17 PM #8 jeff Senior Member Array Join Date Nov 2002 Location It's a dry heat Posts 6,686 Originally Posted by Feltan It should! It was designed to withstand nuclear catastrophe! Regards, Feltan Well, yes, it was designed to withstand large physical failures (eg: RIP permits dynamic routing around failed nodes and subnets). The biggest technology problems have been in different areas: Internet protocols use cleartext authentication (or none at all), so identity can be spoofed (want to send mail from 'god@universe.org'? It can be done. Are you sure that mail you've received is from who you think it is from, and hasn't been snooped or altered in flight? Want to force a DNS zone transfer?) , doesn't provide 'quality of service', can be subjected to denial-of-service attacks, and so forth. The original Internet assumed trusted parties, which aint the case now, for sure. Nonetheless, a monumental achievement. What I meant was the current organizational system, which definitely did not have nuclear survivability in mind! And that's worked too, despite all kinds of problems like domain squatting. I'd rather leave it as-is than turn the Internet over to the tender mercies of (IMO) unaccountable and clueless political entities. "In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, theory and practice are different." 01-09-2006 12:33 PM #9 pigeonmeister Senior Member Array Join Date May 2005 Location London, UK Posts 1,065 Originally Posted by Epee_Pox Pidge, that article has been cut-and-pasted all over the internet. And discussed everywhere, too. And correct me if I'm wrong, but just a few months ago weren't the same sources, and the UN, and the EU all angry at the US for controlling the internet, and everyone wanted more involvment by individual governments? Now people are mad at the US for giving control of country domains to those individual governments. Talk about chutzpah. I agree. To be honest my knowledge of the internet is nowhere near some of those on this forum, I apologise if this is old news. It was the Iraq dynamic that caught my attention and it is in this area that I worry about the most powerful country in the world having unilateral control of the world's most powerful global communication medium. I can see how the perception of this being another tool for US hegemony lingers- the problem is that it is very difficult to have, within this issue sphere, a serious debate at the present time. The bottom line is that, issues of American hegemony aside, the world and the internet would probably not be a better place (at this time anyway) with the establishment of burdensome intergovernmental oversight or multinational treaties. I would doubt that the present system will remain for that long though. 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