Week 9

Building Legal Institutions for Information Technology 1: Internet

Governance

Milton L.Mueller. 2002. Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and Taming of Cyberscape. MIT Press

Organization of the Book

• Framework & Backgrounds

• Historical

• Internet under ICANN (policies, social issues, stakes)

The Problem of the Root

• Reston, Virginia (July 1998) Unusual gathering• Model, Common Principles, Structure & general

Charter provisions• Informal meet• Domain name wars• The “White Paper”• US - Unusal approach to the transition• IFWP, ICANN

The Root

• IP Address, Domain Name• Virtual Real Estate• IFWP

– Authority to set policy, allocation of IP addresses– Add new domain names– Operating root server

• Internet governance• Internet “Drivers License”• Should a domain name administrator concerned

with authenticity of the content associated with a specific domain name?

Institutionalization

• Worry on distribution of power over the root

• Describes what happened to internet from 1996 – 2001

• Who controls the Internet?

– No one

– Corporations / people who has power to issue authoritative commands

• Control takes the form of Institutions, not commands

The Basic Political Economy of Identifiers

• Unique identifiers

• Difficult to do in a distributive manner

• Two ways of achieving uniqueness

– Defining the space

– Assigning values within the space

Layer 3: Policy

Decisions about Rights

Layer 2: Economics

Decisions about Rationing Scarcity

Layer 1: Technical

Coordination to ensure uniqueness

The Basic Political Economy of Identifiers

• Policy problems created by semantics• Lose of identity, promotion of identity• Rationing methods

– First come first serve– Administrative fees– Market pricing– Merit distribution

• Difference between the ways telecommunication and the Internet approached the governance arrangements.

The Basic Political Economy of Identifiers

• Governance arrangements• Ethernet address space

– IEEE 802, comes with h/w– 24 + 40 bit combination – 24 – Organizational unique identifier– 40 to be used by the purchasing organization– Simple two part hierarchy

• Discussed to find the distinction between identifiers that are publicly visible and meaningful and those that are not.

The Basic Political Economy of Identifiers

• Essential tasks to maintain uniqueness:– Maintain the uniqueness of identifiers by

making that assignments exclusive (technical layer)

– Prevent the resource from being consumed in an inefficient manner (the economic layer)

– Resolve competition or disputes around particular assignments (the policy layer)

The Internet name and Address Spaces

• Request For Comments – RFCs• Packets, IP Address• Two part model

– Network to which a computer is attached– Specific device attached to that network

• Class based addressing• Routers

– Find a specific physical network in a specifc location– Make decisions about how to forward data packets to

their destination.– Routing tables

The Internet name and Address Spaces

• Internet Address Registries• IPv4 address space become scarcer

– Tightened address policies– Development of new protocol (CIDR)– Creation of larger address space

• Internet name space– Naming computers (single identifier)– Network Information Center (hosts.txt)– Domain Name Service (DNS)

DNS

• Highly distributed• Consists of 4 basic

elements– Name space– Name servers (stores list of

domain names and associated IP address)

– Resolvers (generate queries)

– Resource records (data or content stored in name server)

• In-addr.arpa registration of IP addresses

Top-level domains (COM, EDU, ORG, NET)

Second-level domains(name of the domain E.g., india)

Third-level domains (www, INT, IST)

DNS Root

• Refers to Root zone file & Root name server

• Standards Competition (Issue)– Users choices are affected by value of

compatibility with other users.– Example : Incompatibility between IBM &

Apple machines

Necessary to create new DNS Root

• Not-enough top level domains

• Technological innovations (character support)

• Political resistance

The Root and Institutional Change

• A huge ocean. No one owns it.– Institutional naïveté

• Institutionalization of the internet driven Innovation.

• Questions the Relationship between technology & institutional change.

• How technological endowment can lead to significant & rapid institutional changes.

• The need for institutional arrangements will become urgent, especially when the resource space created requires sharing or coordination to be used effectively.

The Root and Institutional Change

• “Tragedy of the commons” story• 3 major barriers to the resolution of the

property rights conflict.– There was no established, formal organization

with clear authority over the root.– Attempts to define property rights in domain

names suffered from the major conflicts over the distribution of wealth.

– Contracting proved to be difficult because of the heterogeneity of the groups involved.

Growing the Root

• ARPANET • First ARPANET node installed at UCLA• Responsible persons:

– Steve Crocker Request For Comments – Jon Postel Assignments of ports & protocols– Vinton Cerf One of the principle desingners of

TCP/IP

• Development of TCP.• Connection oriented, connectionless

approaches.

Growing the Root

• 1982 - Invention of Domain Name Sysem• Each system maintained hosts.txt• The real push for network growth came

not from the need to share mainframes but from email.

• Email contributed in exchanging ideas• First top level domain : .darpa• Proposed top level domains : .darpa, .ddn,

.gov, .cor, .pub

Growing the Root

• Semantic issues• OSI – Open Systems Interconnection• Technology adoption choices powerfully

shaped by the choices other adopters make

• Subsidize initial adoption– E.g., TCP/IP by DARPA

• Gateways developed to effective communication with other protocols

Growing the Root

• National Science Foundation Backbone to support educational researches.

• 1989 – RIPE (Reseaux IP Europeens) – Amsterdam

• Criticism over US’s hold on IP addresses• Required US government sponsor to get

IP address.• 1990 – above barrier removed using the

in-addr.darpa entries

Growing the Root

• IETF – All documentation was open, non-copyrighted and freely available

• 1992 - Formation of Internet Society• Internet Society seen as way of funding IETF,

IAB• Who controlled Root?

– Direct & Indirect support U.S. Military– Federal Networking Council (FNC)– Fear that the whole internet could come to a

screeching halt if the military flexed its muscle

Appropriating the Root

• URL (Uniform Resource Locator)

• Domain names began to refer contents

• .com became default extension for names without top level extensions

• Registration for domains went up faster

• Development of domain name market in other countries

Appropriating the Root

• Raise of property rights conflicts

• Name Speculation:– Individuals hold domain names of large

companies knowingly / unknowingly– Resale of domain names became a business– Complicacies of first-come/fist-served

principle– Dennis Toeppen – registered 200 domains

with famous, trademarked names

Appropriating the Root

• Typo-Squatting– Registered misspellings of the domain names of the

popular Web sites/ company names– E.g., yhahoo.com

• Parody, preemption and diversion– Used for Unfair competition– Wrongly imitating the opponents domain

• Rights of Personality– Name registered is someone famous

Appropriating the Root

• Domain Dispute Resolution Policy Statement – by Network Solutions to prevent the rights of the third parties

• Favoring trademark owners

• Some more policies brought out the relationship between domain names and trademarks in U.S. law.

Appropriating the Root

• Loop holes in the policies (don’t know the duration)– Cost of nuisance registrations $100– Cost of recovering >= $10000– High transaction cost affected ordinary

registrants– Both foreign and domestic registrants were

not required to identify themselves correctly in the registration record

Appropriating the Root

• Delegation conflicts over country codes

• New rule: Expressed wishes of the government with regard to the domain name manager of the country

• Newdom –creating new top-level domains to reassert the authority of “the community” over internet administration

Appropriating the Root

• Claims over the Root:– Internet Society (ISOC)– U.S. Government– Alternative Root Servers

The Root in Play

• Blue ribbon international panel – to develop and implement a blueprint for a global governance structure

• 1996 – formation of International Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC)

• Established policies on monopoly

• Established corporate structure

The Root in Play

• Generic Top-Level Domain Memorandum of Understanding (gTLD-MOU)

• The MOUment– IETF procedures had been abondoned– Political, Personal & economic alliances used

MOU to show their neutrality

The Root in Play

• Governance wars• Business community opposed / refused to

lend their support for MOU.• U.S. Government intervened

– National Science Foundation exited from NSI alliance

– Nationalistic sentiments– Green paper – Statement of US governments

authority over name & address root

Institutionalizing the Root

• Fighting the Green Paper• Assembling the dominant coalition

– Global Internet Project (GIP)– IBM & MCI’s internet division

• 1998 – White Paper (?)– “Statement of Policy” instead of “rule making

document”– Not-for-profit corporation, containing private sector

stakeholders, to administer the policy for the Internet name & address system.

– International Forum on the White Paper (IFWP)

Appropriating the Root: Property rights conflict

• May 1991 – National Science Foundation permitted commercial traffic to cross the NSFNET.

• Stipulations over cost recovery, surplus revenues & quality of service followed

• 1993 - Moved to entirely new architecture for the internet

• NSF withdrew from backbone support.

Appropriating the Root: Property rights conflict

• World Wide Web - made internet easier to navigate

• Browsers (Mosaic, Netscape, Internet Explorer) – attracted much broader base of users

• Internet became mass medium for communication and commerce

Appropriating the Root: Property rights conflict

• Decline of IFWP– Loosely organized– Informal group– Several supporters of IANA obstructed

attempts to push the IFWP process

• IANA became centrifugal point of incorporation process

• Formation of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)

Appropriating the Root: Property rights conflict

• ICANN agreed to Jointly design, Develop and test the mechanisms, methods and procedures needed to transfer management of the root

The New Regime

• Property systems created by ICANN– Network solutions’ monopoly profits were redistributed– Trademark protection became one of the major

determinants of registering a domain– Artificial Scarcity in top-level domain was maintained– Network solutions succeeded in retaining the long

term property right over the .com domain– National govt & Internation govts won a limited role in

ICANN’s structure– US govt retained the residual authority over the DNS

root

The New Regime

• New Top Level domains– Applications for new TLD (Top – Level

domains)– Application fees alone totaled US$2.5 million– .info, .biz, .name, .museum

Issues and Themes

• ICANN– Federalist structure – Effects and rule making authority need to be

closely related– Deviates from the bottom-up consensus

model because of decisions it has to take

References• http://computer.howstuffworks.com/dns.htm/printable

• http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-033.html - Internet Domain Names Privatization Competition And Freedom Of Expression by Milton L. Mueller

• http://ischool.syr.edu/FACSTAFF/member.aspx?id=118 – Milton L Mueller

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel - Jon Postel

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nameserver - Root name server

• http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/domainname/dnsdrft.htm - “Green Paper” explaining US government's definitive authority over the Internet DNS root zone