If We Build it, They Will Come...and They Will Want Control

A long time ago in a university not far away, some very intelligent Americans were inspired by a military project known as ARPANET and created the first TCP/IP wide area network. What does all that mean? It means that they laid the groundwork that would become the Internet. That's right...the Americans (not just Al Gore) created the Internet. So why is it that the world now wants us to turn over control to them?

The New York Times has an article today that talks about the current battle being waged between the United States and the European Union over who should have control of the Internet.

Delegates meeting in Geneva for the past two weeks had been hoping to reach consensus for a draft document by Friday after two years of debate.

Uh huh, that's exactly who I want running the Internet. Let's take technology that runs at lightening speed and hand it over to a group that just spent two years in committee trying to figure out who should be in charge.

The article goes on to say:

The EU and developing nations, they added, wanted to send a signal to America that it could not run things alone. Opposition to Washington's continued dominance of the Internet was illustrated by a statement released last week by the Brazilian delegation to the talks. "On Internet governance, three words tend to come to mind: lack of legitimacy. In our digital world, only one nation decides for all of us."

Now I realize that not everyone had an excellent grammar teacher, but where I come from, "could not" means unable. It doesn't mean "we don't want them to." As for lack of legitimacy, how is there a lack of legitimacy in someone running what they've created? Did Dave Thomas say to Ray Kroc "hey, nice job on that McDonald's thing, I'll be taking over now!"

The United States has sharply criticized demands, like one made last week by Iran, for a UN body to govern the Internet, Gross said. "No intergovernmental body should control the Internet," he said, "whether it's the UN or any other." U.S. officials argue that a system like the one proposed by the EU would lead to unwanted bureaucratization of the Internet.

The problem with giving control of the Internet over to an international body is that the complexity of regulating something under the laws of dozens of countries would create a system of red tape so severe that nothing would ever get accomplished. Sort of like, oh, the UN?

The only bright part of the article came when the author pointed out an alternative solution:

Without consensus, some experts say that countries might move ahead with setting up their own domain name system, or DNS, as a way of bypassing Icann.

Ok then! Sounds like a plan to me. You want your own domain name systems, go ahead and set them up. Then each country can decide if they want to recognize the other countries systems. No problem, everybody is happy.