America’s Control of the Internet

J. Kenneth Stewart III

Benn Ray

Ideas in Writing

11/17/05

Controlling The Internet

The origins of the Internet began with Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation, which was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force to do a study on how it could maintain its command and control over its missiles and bombers after a nuclear attack. It was to be a military research network that could survive a nuclear strike, decentralized so that if any location in America were attacked, the military could still have control over their nuclear arms for a counter attack (Castells).

The Internet of present day is far more diversified in the way it is used then it was when it was originally invented. The Internet of today is the largest internet in the world. It is a three level hierarchy composed of backbone networks, mid-level networks, and stub networks. These networks include commercial (.com or .co), university (.ac or .edu) and other research (.org, .net) and military (.mil) networks which can be accessed around the world (Ho). Although the Internet has undergone a metamorphosis since it’s beginning in the 1960’s, the control over the Internet has not. Today the U.S. still has control over the Internet, which is causing many countries to ask why.

The controversy began in March of 2003, when ICANN (created by the U.S. Department of Commerce to manage the Domain Name System, which is a process of assigning unique Internet names and addresses to websites), decided to limit and reduce direct public participation over how it runs the Internet. This caused uproar in many developing countries, Including China, India and Iran. These countries feel that it is the right of the world to govern and run the Internet and not the right of a sole country. Countries like China proposed that an international body much like the U.N. should be created to perform the task of ICANN. Other countries even suggested that the United Nations itself should be responsible for managing the welfare of the Internet (Ho).

When the U.N. formally met in March of 2005 in Tunisia, four such ideas resolving the conflict over control of the Internet were presented to U.N. council members (Puddington). Although all four proposals had different suggestions of how and who should run the Internet, all contained one similar notion, that the United States must lay down its control of the Internet and turn it over to a governing intern body until a further decision could be made over who would run it (Ho). This, however, would not be the case because as the meeting ended today in Tunisia it was overwhelmingly decided that the U.S. would maintain control over the Internet, at least for the present time (Moore). This caused some countries to go as far as to say that if the present situation involving the Internet is not resolved shortly that they would be forced to fragment the Internet, which would involve other connected networks similar to the Internet to be created to compete with the existing Internet, causing problems for every network that is presently connected to the Internet (Ho).

While countries such as China, India and Iran seem to pose a reasonable argument as to why the Internet should be governed by a world appointed body it is not their decision to make. The United States originally invented the technology that created the Internet and therefore has the right as the inventor to maintain an unbiased control over the Internet. To date there have not been any complaints of how the U.S. has run the Internet, it controls the Internet with an unbiased view, all who pay the fee to start and maintain