European countries surprised the U.S. Wednesday by suggesting that an international body rather than the U.S. government should have ultimate control over certain Internet functions. According to Tom Wright’s story in the International Herald Tribune,

The United States lost its only ally [at the U.N.’s World Summit on the Information Society] late Wednesday when the EU made a surprise proposal to create an intergovernmental body that would set principles for running the Internet. Currently the U.S. Commerce Department approves changes to the Internet’s “root zone files”, which are administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, a nonprofit organization based in Marina del Rey, California.

As often happens, this discussion seems to confuse control over Internet naming with control over the Internet as a whole. Note the juxtaposition: the EU wants a new body to “set principles for running the Internet”; currently the U.S. controls naming via Icann.

This battle would be simpler and less intense if it were only about naming. What is really at issue is who will have the perceived legitimacy to regulate the Internet. The U.S. fears a U.N.-based regulator, as do I. Much of the international community fears and resents U.S. hegemony over the Net. (General anti-Americanism plays a role too, as in the Inquirer’s op-ed.)

The U.S. would have cleaner hands in this debate if it swore off broad regulation of the Net. It’s hard for the U.S. to argue against creating a new Internet regulator when the U.S. itself looks eager to regulate the Net. Suspicion is strong that the U.S. will regulate the Net to the advantage of its entertainment and e-commerce industries. Here’s the Register’s story:

The UN’s special adviser for internet governance, Nitin Desai, told us that the issue of control was particularly stark for developing nations, where the internet is not so much an entertainment or e-commerce medium but a vital part of the country’s infrastructure.

[Brazilian] Ambassador Porto clarified that point further: “Nowadays our voting system in Brazil is based on ICTs [information and communication technologies], our tax collection system is based on ICTs, our public health system is based on ICTs. For us, the internet is much more than entertainment, it is vital for our constituencies, for our parliament in Brazil, for our society in Brazil.” With such a vital resource, he asked, “how can one country control the Internet?”

The U.S. says flatly that it will not agree to an international governance scheme at this time.

If the U.S. doesn’t budge, and the international group tries to go ahead on its own, we might possibly see a split, where a new entity I’ll call “UNCANN” coexists with ICANN, with each of the two claiming authority over Internet naming. This won’t break the Internet, since each user will choose to pay attention to either UNCANN or ICANN. To the extent that UNCANN and ICANN assign names differently, there will be some confusion when UNCANN users talk to ICANN users. I wouldn’t expect many differences, though, so probably the creation of UNCANN wouldn’t make much difference, except in two respects. First, the choice to point one’s naming software at UNCANN or ICANN would probably take on symbolic importance, even if it made little practical difference. Second, UNCANN’s aura of legitimacy as a naming authority would make it easier for UNCANN to issue regulatory decrees that were taken seriously by the states that would ultimately have to implement them.

This last issue, of regulatory legitimacy, is the really important one. All the talk about naming is a smokescreen.

My guess is that the Geneva meeting will break up with much grumbling but no resolution of this issue. The EU and the rest of the international group won’t move ahead with its own naming authority, and the U.S. will tread more carefully in the future. That’s the best outcome we can hope for in the short term.

In the longer term, this issue will have to be resolved somehow. Until it is, many people around the world will keep asking the question, “Who runs the Internet?”, and not liking the answer.

The U.S. government has joined other governments and groups in asking ICANN to delay implementation of a new “.xxx” top-level domain, according to a BBC story.

Adding a .xxx domain would make little difference in web users’ experiences. Those who want to find porn can easily find it already; and those who want to avoid it can easily avoid it. It might seem at first that the domain will create more “space” for porn sites. But there’s already “space” on the web for any new site, of any type, that somebody wants to create. The issue here is not whether sites can exist, but what they can call themselves.

Adding .xxx won’t make much difference in how sites are named, either. I wouldn’t be happy to see a porn site at freedom-to-tinker.xxx; nor would the operator of that site be happy to see my site here at freedom-to-tinker.com. The duplication just causes confusion. Your serious profit-oriented porn purveyor will want to own both the .com and .xxx versions of his site’s URL; and there’s nothing to stop him from owning both.

Note also that the naming system does not provide an easy way for end users to get a catalog of all names that end in a particular suffix. Anybody can build an index of sites that fall into a particular category. Such indices surely exist for porn sites.

The main effect of adding .xxx would be to let sites signal that they have hard-core content. That’s reportedly the reason adult theaters started labeling their content “XXX” in the first place – so customers who wanted such content could learn where to find it.

That kind of signaling is a lousy reason to create a new top-level domain. There are plenty of other ways to signal. For example, sites that wanted to signal their XXX nature could offer their home page at xxx.sitename.com in addition to www.sitename.com. But ICANN has chosen to create .xxx anyway.

Which brings us to the governments’ objections. Perhaps they object to .xxx as legitimizing the existence of porn on the net. Or perhaps they object to the creation of a mechanism that will make it easier for people to find porn.

These objections aren’t totally frivolous. There’s no top-level domain for religious groups, or for science, or for civic associations. Why create one for porn? And surely the private sector can fill the need for porn-signaling technology. Why is ICANN doing this? (Governments haven’t objected to ICANN’s decisions before, even though those decisions often made no more sense than this decision does. But that doesn’t mean ICANN is managing the namespace well.)

And so ICANN’s seemingly arbitrary management of the naming system brings it into conflict with governments. This is a sticky situation for ICANN. ICANN is nominally in charge of Internet naming, but ICANN’s legitimacy as a “government” for the net has always been shaky, and it has to worry about losing what legitimacy it has if the U.S. joins the other governments who want to replace ICANN with some kind of consortium of nations.

The U.S. government is asking ICANN to delay implementation of .xxx so it can study the issue. We all know what that means. Expect .xxx to fade away quietly as the study period never ends.