Internet father Vint Cerf, WWW creator Tim Berners-Lee and two dozen of their peers and colleagues are trying to take de facto control of the Internet back from government in a worldwide coordinated movement. Much of the world is demanding change as PRISM brought home the breadth of U.S. surveillance; the “wise old men” of the net, angered themselves by PRISM, are terrified about governments coming in heavily.

     The proposals are without details yet but the intent is clear: practical problems will mostly be resolved in ICANN and IETF, with an informal coalition of the most respected Internet engineers persuading governments to keep out of the way.

ICANN under Fadi Chehadé will re-organize, moving much of the organization to Istanbul and Singapore. He will not formally disassociate from the U.S. government charter. Chahadé just announced in India and will probably repeat next week at IGF Bali

• The Affirmation of Commitments needs to change from being a contract between ICANN and the US Government, to a contract between ‘ICANN and you’.
• The handling of the IANA function needs to be structured in keeping with the idea that it is the ‘root of the world’ rather than of any one country.
• ICANN headquarters would be split between Los Angeles, Istanbul and Singapore, and hiring in Los Angeles is to be frozen. (quick notes by audience member which I will confirm when the video is up.)

     ICANN and the regional registries will run the domain system. IETF under Jari Arkko will set technical standards. IETF already cooperates with GSMA on mobile and ITU on fixed and that will continue. Organizations like IEEE and ISOC are likely to be supportive. 

    The first public disclosure was the Montevideo Statement (below) from the registries, W3C, ISOC and IETF. It was worded so diplomatically I initially thought it was just a a typical conference feelgood agreement. Milton Mueller was the first to declare this meant much more. He writes

THE CORE INTERNET INSTITUTIONS ABANDON THE US GOVERNMENT

In Montevideo, Uruguay this week, the Directors of all the major Internet organizations – ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Society, all five of the regional Internet address registries – turned their back on the US government. With striking unanimity, the organizations that actually develop and administer Internet standards and resources initiated a break with 3 decades of U.S. dominance of Internet governance. …

. A day after the Montevideo declaration, the President and CEO of ICANN, Fadi Chehadi – the man vetted by the US government to lead its keystone Internet governance institution – met with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. And at this meeting, Chehade engaged in some audacious private Internet diplomacy. He asked “the president [of Brazil] to elevate her leadership to a new level, to ensure that we can all get together around a new model of governance in which all are equal.”

    My take is Milton is overstating a bit. The same folks are actively working with the U.S. government in other areas. Timbl is fronting the U.S. government supported Alliance for Affordable Internet. ISOC is extremely close to the U.S. government as well. Beth Simone Noveck was on the Obama Transition Team and in the administration.

    The first key challenge to the change: governments don’t like being pushed to the side. The U.S. has uninformed hotheads making massive noise in D.C. that taking the net away from nominal U.S. control will destroy freedom. Some are right wing zealots. Others, prominent inside government, see the Internet debates as “Do you want Russia and China to run the Internet?” Behind it all are the U.S. three letter agencies like NSA that will do anything to keep the Internet open to overwhelming U.S. surveillance. The rest of the world hates that, even our European allies.

    Three quarters of the world’s countries – and about the same fraction of Internet users – despises the idea the the U.S. and U.S. allies “control the Internet.” That’s how the vote went at Dubai. The issue is almost entirely symbolic, as long as the “network of networks” continues to freely interchange traffic. The U.S., France, China, Russia and Iran already have total legal authority within their own borders. The rest of the world, whether U.S. or ITU, has no power beyond moral suasion. In practice, as long as the networks are well-interconnected, those who really want to can bypass almost any restriction. The actual day-to-day decisions mostly affect things like whether your domain registration will cost $9 or $15. Meaningful but not worth world-scale battle. 

     China already has twice as many Internet users as the U.S. In the next 2-4 years both Africa and India will also have more net users than America  with the spread of $50-$100 smart phones . They don’t want to be dictated to and inevitably power will shift in the long term. The “Cabal of Elders” all personally acknowledge this but nearly all those publicly identified are U.S. centric. China, Russia and Latin America have very few in the leadership group. The second challenge will be to win support from those in the emerging world outside of the current establishment. 

     The smartest move for the U.S. will be to honor our principles and support this wise effort to keep the Internet open. That’s almost impossible in D.C., however. We have hotheads still fighting the cold war. We have corporations making literally $hundreds of billions in the old system resisting change, including Google, AT&T and Cisco. Above all in government policy, NSA and friends are profoundly committed to watching everyone and have convinced even Barack Obama to support them nearly totally.

     Most in the U.S. believe our own propaganda that the WCIT battle was about freedom versus censorship. Of course China, Saudi Arabia and Russia have a different idea of “free speech” than we do. Giving the rest of the world a share of power will swing things away from the U.S. way of doing things. I personally believe in continuing to fight that battle, but as I came to understand the actual governance issues realized that nothing at WCIT would have much impact on my actual freedom on the net. China and Iran will do what they will domestically and let the U.S. and Europe do what we choose in our own countries. The U.S. has no claim to moral high ground in any case; Cisco was a primary contractor on the Great Firewall of China. The U.S. in the ITU strongly supported Chinese style central control and DPI surveillance.

     Vint, Timbl, Paul Mockapetris (inventor of DNS), Jari Arkko (IETF Chair), Paul Vixie (authored SEND, maintained BIND), Joi Ito (Director, MIT Media Lab), Bitange Ndemo (Kenyan Minister), Bob Hinden (crucial in IPv6), and the 50-100 others involved have earned our respect. There’s an informal consensus among them to avoid the formalities here, including not directly attacking the U.S. (very lightly used) legal control of the system. They have no official power, only intelligence and moral suasion. They are avoiding the security issues that are the real driver of the battles, much as we wish it were otherwise.

     They will be opposed by the national interests of U.S. security, Russia, China and probably others. Inevitably, they will come in conflict with some major corporations who are now shielded by the U.S. from demands of the poorer nations of the world. One constant battle is the declining terms of trade in communications, costing Africa $billions. “Sender pays” is anti-consumer in the developed world. It generally raises prices by giving power to charge to giant carriers with market power. But it may be the only way to address the African loss of income. I’ve followed the money and billions are accruing to AT&T (lower LD payments) & Google (which pays almost no taxes in Africa). Google and AT&T drove the U.S. demand to take this off the table at WCIT. 

    Two billion more people will connect to the net in the next few years, enabled by the $50 smartphones and must be included.

    Here’s the Montevideo Statement and the ICANN Strategy Panel announcement, both with important names.

Montevideo Statement on the Future of Internet Cooperation

 7 October 2013