Control the Internet? A Futile Pursuit, Some Say

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Control the Internet? A Futile Pursuit, Some Say
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: November 14, 2005


SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 13 - Working with Pentagon funds in the 1960's and 1970's, a small group of designers created a pioneering research network called the Arpanet and a software framework that could let an unlimited number of computers exchange data.

Their creation, which came to be known as the Internet, was decentralized in nature, with its maintenance and administration left mostly to academia and the private sector in the United States. Government intervention was limited.

But as the Internet's reach has extended worldwide, an international political battle over its control has arisen. A meeting sponsored by the United Nations this week in Tunis will take up a challenge to American authority over Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Icann was established in 1998 to manage the Domain Name System, or D.N.S., which assigns network names like disney.com and assures unique addresses.

The Tunis meeting, called the World Summit on the Information Society, will consider calls for an end to unilateral American oversight. But several people involved in the Internet's creation are concerned that the dispute may be based on a false premise - that the Internet can lend itself to centralized or governmental control - and could wind up fragmenting the network itself.

"Everyone seems to think that the D.N.S. system is a big deal, but it's not the heartbeat of the Internet," said Leonard Kleinrock, a computer scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who did pioneering research in data packet switching, the fundamental technique underlying networks. "Who controls the flow of the ocean? Nobody controls it, and it works just fine. There are some things that can't be controlled and should be left distributed."...


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/14/business/14register.html