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The Internet: a case of `founders keepers?

Anand Parthasarathy

The second World Summit on the Information Society that opens in Tunis on November 16 will see a renewed effort by developing nations, with U.N. backing, to transfer `control' of the Internet from the U.S. to an independent body.

THE WORD "cyber space" was coined long before the Internet was born. In fact it is the creation of American novelist William Gibson who used it in his novel Neuromancer a good ten years before the World Wide Web gradually became a reality.

At the turn of the century, Gibson, asked to comment on the shape taken by his unintended brainchild said perceptively: "The Internet is extra national and post geographical. It is happening largely outside the jurisdiction of politicians. It is truly one of the strangest things we have done as a species. and we have done it inadvertently. If we take care of it, it may be a step towards a better world." His instinct was right in one important aspect: the relative freedom from political control that Internet enjoyed.

Indeed its origins lay in a network called DARPANet, a creation of the U.S. government's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which was initially handed over to a consortium of American academic institutions, then grew and grew... to become today's Internet.

By late 1980s the number of Internet users — and hence addresses — became unmanageable without some regulation. The U.S. Department of Commerce and the Post and Telecommunications Department established the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which in 1998 became the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a private corporation that includes a number of stakeholders. In recent years, the ICANN has been criticised for being dominated by corporate interests in the developed world, who had cornered the majority of available addresses. This is one of the reasons, nations like India have been early supporters of IPv6 (Internet Protocol version six) the next Net avatar which will increase the size of the address (which translate into the somethingdotcom or someonedotnet name) from 32 bits (which can give at most 4.2 billion different addresses) to 128 bits that will boost the possible addresses to almost infinity. India has also staked its national claim to an Internet identity with its own ".in" suffix earlier this year.

But many developing nations have been uncomfortable with the implicit control that the ICANN, a U.S. creation, exerts on the Internet and have been advocating a monitoring role for a truly international agency — possibly a U.N. arm like the International Telecommunication Union. This was mooted at the first World Summit of the Information Society in Geneva, 2003, but was rather unceremoniously swept aside. It will again loom at Tunis this week as the single biggest issue on the agenda when the second WSIS opens on November 16. Preliminary meetings held in September, saw the impasse only harden, with the U.S. officially hardening its opposition to changing the status quo. Indeed some commentators have called the U.S. posture a "Monroe Doctrine for the 21st century."

"Dollar divide"

Internet governance — who owns Internet — may be a pressing issue for many nations, but it may not be more important than other weighty issues on the WSIS agenda — like how to use the fruits of technology to bridge the digital divide. Here again, critics speak of a `dollar divide' — the fact that the U.N. has an almost empty kitty in its efforts to leverage technology for empowering the underprivileged. A Digital Solidarity Fund has been mooted to fill this lacuna and the U.N. has so far raised $5.7 million from member states. Should IT-related activity by corporations and profit makers be taxed to create a corpus for the less advantaged? This is just one proposal that will be aired in Tunis.

The event should see global interest focused on India for one reason at least. The country's shrewd harnessing of people's talents and energy to carve a name as a premier IT destination is one of the success stories of the world's ongoing affair with computers and communication.

But the challenge to use such an edge to reach out to under-empowered rural millions is something that continues to challenge and provoke — and there may be lessons to be learnt from other similarly positioned developing economies.

So, as we showcase the success of Kerala's "Akshaya" e-literacy programme and Karnataka's "Bhoomi" project to computerise land records; as we tout the reach of Andhra Pradesh's "e-Seva" citizen services and the spread of wireless-based rural telephony networks, we might do worse than listen to planners from Brazil and Egypt, Thailand and South Africa, who in their own way have shown that no divide, even a digital one, is unbridgeable, if people and governments want to do it.

Meanwhile they will continue to ask, `who owns Internet' and recall that old school rhyme, "Finders keepers, losers weepers" — except that in the case of the World Wide Web, it's the founders rather than finders, who are hanging on to control of the modern day wonder they call the Internet.

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