U.S. Protects the Internet

This month, the United Nations revived a latent desire to wrest control of the Internet away from the United States. Congress, the State Department, and Americans of all political stripes should join with those who revere free expression and steadfastly oppose the scheme. In our ceaselessly over-governed age, the Internet serves as a shining example of the virtue of decentralized free enterprise and of America’s commitment to free expression. With the egregious exception of the totalitarian and theocratic states, governments play very little role in the content of the Web. In most countries, private businesses and agencies provide Internet access, Web hosting, and domain-name registration, and leave it to free individuals to do the rest. There is minimal regulation. It is no accident that there is no equivalent to the DMV in cyberspace; the majority of Internet users do not require licenses for anything they do online — a credit card will suffice. Scattered, raw, and unregulated as it is, the Internet does have a couple of centralized elements. The first is a small file referred to as the “DNS Root Zone.” Put extremely simply, this is the apex of a master list of website addresses or “domain names,” such as “nationalreview.com.” This list is necessary in order to avoid multiple and contradictory registrations of the same address; think of it as the Internet’s Rolodex. The second is the allocation of “IP addresses,” which — again, to put it extremely simply — are the “phone numbers” used by each computer to contact and be contacted by others. Since 1998, these two services have been administered by a private Californian non-profit called ICANN, which is overseen with a very light touch by the U.S. Department of Commerce. (Prior to the creation of ICANN, the U.S. government ran the list in-house.) Ultimately, it is American control of these two vital services that so vexes the likes of Russia and China. And given the potential of the Internet to undermine the authority of authoritarian regimes, their chagrin is understandable...more