i-Technology News

The U.S. Government has made security the centerprice of a unilateral decision with respect to a global issue, this time with respect to the Internet. By saying it would maintain control of several root servers, rather than turn them over to ICANN or another international organization, the government has caused concern among members of the international community.

The U.S. announcement marked a departure from previously stated policy, which stated in 1998 that the U.S. would be turning control of the servers. The Internet, of course, was started in the U.S. as a Department of Defense project, and its management has been put into the hands of world organizations and private enterprise in phases over the past decade as its usage has dramatically risen with the advent of the World Wide Web, which was developed in Switzerland.

Michael D. Gallagher, assistant secretary for communications and information at the Commerce Department called the decision "the foundation of U.S. policy going forward" rather than a reversal of the previously announced policy.

"The signals and words and intentions and policies need to be clear so all of us benefiting in the world from the internet and in the U.S. economy can have confidence there will be continued stewardship," Gallagher told The Associated Press on Thursday. He said the declaration, officially made in a four-paragraph statement posted online, was in response to growing security threats and increased reliance on the internet globally for communications and commerce.

The computers in question serve as the internet's master directories and tell web browsers and e-mail programs how to direct traffic. Internet users around the world interact with them every day, and they are, in fact, already under private managment. However, the list of approved suffixes (.com, .net, .fr, etc.) are still approved by the U.S. Government, even though the majority of the suffixes denote the non-U.S. domains of the countries of the world.

In 1998, the U.S. Department of Commerce selected ICANN  to decide what goes on those lists but kept veto power over the process. It said it would relinquish this power once ICANN met certain conditions. The department's updated declaration restates the policy as saying it would keep control irrespective of any conditions being met by ICANN.

It is theoretically possible for countries that object strongly enough to this decision to create a separate DNS and engender chaos into the Web's URL system. More likely, this issue will be debated privately and publicly in the runup to a meeting of the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society meeting in November in Tunisia.

The current U.S. administration, which seems ambivalent toward the U.N. in general, may not be moved by any of this debate or the meeting. But the administration also believes it has made the correct decision regarding server control. Gallagher reportedly said that the Commerce Department supports having each national government manage its own suffix, and that U.S. government control of the other suffixes maintains certainty among Internet deployers and users. "Uncertainty is not something that we think is in the United States' interest or the world's interest," he reportedly told the AP.