The poisoned chalice of the internet world is surely the chairmanship of Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. First it tainted the well-known "netrepreneur" Esther Dyson, who filled the position from Icann's founding in 1998 until November 2000. Now, the position threatens to damage one of the technology world's more admired figures, the vice president of WorldCom, Vint Cerf.
Cerf is widely viewed as the father of the internet for having co-developed the language that lets one computer talk to another over the networks that became the internet. Icann's job is to administer the internet's most basic function - the names and numbers that identify computers to each other. The numbers are the IP (internet protocol) addresses, the "real" net addresses you see flash up in a corner of your web browser's window when you type in a website name. The names are the domain names - such as theguardian.com, or yahoo.com - that are associated with the numbers but are easier for people to remember.
Much of this work was done by two entities until 1998. One is viewed as a techie saint - the late Jon Postel, the computing guru at the University of Southern California. Postel developed many of the basic protocols of net administration and ran the Internet Assigned Names Authority (Iana), which dealt with matters involving addresses. The other was a US company called Network Solutions, which managed domain names in a heavy-handed way.
Both were acting through agreements with the US government, which originally funded the development of the internet. As the web began to take off in 1996, the US government decided the administration of the net should lie elsewhere: there was simultaneously a push to internationalise the net's governance. Icann was born, and Dyson was asked to chair it.
The consensus is that Icann has done an appalling job. Created to bring more openness to the net's administration, it held board meetings behind closed doors. Handed crucial tasks such as creating top level domain names - .com, .org and .net have just about been depleted - they did more closed-door debating and created controversy by letting large corporates win the right to administer six new domains. Needing to secure contracts for managing the highest level of domain administration, they engaged in further secretive discussions and, to much alarm, gave the lucrative job to VeriSign - which now owns Network Solutions, the organisation Icann was created to disembowel.
When Icann finally decided to hold elections for five board positions last year, many could not vote because of technical problems. And now, Icann is considering requiring all domain name owners to reveal their full identity and mailing addresses in the net's Whois directory, the online phonebook of domain names. Unsurprisingly, Icann has seen nothing but bickering and a bitter gnawing on various bones of contention by lawyers, corporations, consumer advocates and so on.
This often-noxious crew was never going to find ground for consensus because, by and large, it represents extremes of opinion. Have you ever heard of Icann? Have you contributed to the debates concerning the organisation?. The majority would surely say no: a measly 11,309 cast online ballots in Europe for the one elected European member at large. Yes, the system was flawed, but this is still an appallingly low turnout. Did I vote? No. Almost none of us, except a few vested or passionate interests, are bothering with Icann. Yet Icann is making vital decisions about our net.
Despite the ideals with which it was created, Icann can't seem to get anything right. They consistently alienate. One could argue - and Dyson does, in an interview on the Opendemocracy.net website, that Icann highlights a basic, irreconcilable struggle - the one between the business world, which thinks the net is its marketing tool; some governments, which would like to control content and access; and everyone else, a grab bag of what one might call netizens. Yet Jon Postel managed to balance many of these squabbling interests for years.
The most powerful group in the mix is the Icann board, mostly unelected and mostly from the corporate or government worlds. Dyson is candid in her criticisms of the narrowmindedness of the board. Yet where were these insights when she was in charge? Now Cerf is trying to build trust in Icann. But the VeriSign shenanigans occurred under his watch, and one wonders if he will be able to cast away the chalice.
