The 'ITUnet' Folly: Why The UN Will Never Control The Internet

By Scott Cleland
5/24/2012 
Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/05/24/the-itunet-folly-why-the-un-will-never-control-the-internet/

United Nations regulators imagine they could improve upon the Internet if only they were put in charge of it. A move is afoot, led by Russia and China, to get the International Telecommunications Union to assert intergovernmental control over the Internet by amending a 1988 communications treaty at an ITU conference in Dubai this December.

Any attempt to remake the Internet in the ITU’s image – “the ITUnet” – is pure folly. The essence of the Internet is that it is voluntary; no entity mandated it or controls it. People, companies, entities and nations all voluntarily have chosen to use the Internet because it is the best at what it does.

The folly here is that the ITU does not understand the voluntary nature of the Internet or how the Internet really operates and evolves – because the bottom-up collaborative Internet is the antithesis of top-down governmental command and control.

The Internet is near universal because it is entirely voluntary. All of the Internet’s signature elements are voluntary, not mandated by governments. Internet protocol (IP) is a networking protocol that became universal precisely because it offered the ability for everyone to communicate in basically the same “language.” No one was required to use IP; people voluntarily adopted it because it was better and offered the most universal networking opportunity. Moreover, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), whose “mission is to make the Internet work better,” is an entirely voluntary, collaborative, multi-stakeholder process that functions outside of government control.

The Domain Name System (DNS), essentially the Internet’s address system, rapidly became universal precisely because people voluntarily recognized its essential value and adopted it. No country owns, controls, or approves Internet’s addresses; it’s a collaborative, consensus-based, multi-stakeholder process. The World Wide Web became the third voluntary leg of Internet universality, because it offered a universal application to enable people to get to and display most any kind of Internet content available. With the Internet, the best ideas and innovations win on merit not coercion.

Those imagining the ITU can assert authority over the Internet simply don’t understand how the Internet works. They desperately want to believe the Internet operates like last century’s telephone networks because that’s what they know and that’s what they want it to be, so that they can tax and regulate it to redistribute revenues.

The ITU’s political desire to control the Internet conflicts with the practical impossibility of it being able to control the Internet. Since the ITU has no power or authority to keep nations from choosing to use the existing voluntary Internet, a nation’s vote for an ITUnet would effectively be a vote for that nation to secede from the Internet and to isolate itself from its universal value and benefits.

The fatal flaw in this ITUnet gambit is what the ITU is selling. No one believes the ITU can outperform the Internet’s multi-stakeholder process in promoting innovation and progress; keeping pace with technology change; or reproducing the Internet’s vast number and diversity of apps, sites and information. Internet users would not migrate to an inferior ITUnet under their own volition.

At bottom, this political ITU effort to assert control over the Internet is pure folly, because everyone knows the UN’s ITU is not up to the task of leading the world in cutting-edge technological innovation, progress, and engineering. An ITUnet would be out-of-date by definition. Beware of governmental entities who assert: “leave the innovation to us.”


Scott Cleland is President of Precursor LLC and Chairman of NetCompetition, a pro-competition e-forum supported by broadband interests. During the George H.W. Bush Administration, Cleland served as Deputy United States Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy.