Who Controls the Future of the Internet?

This op-ed ran originally on the US News and World Report site on Friday, February 6th, 2015.  You can find it here, or below.

Who Controls the Future of the Internet? 

One of the areas, however, that we have to get right quickly is how the Internet itself will be governed. Though it is essentially an American creation and still largely overseen by the U.S. government, it has always been the plan for the U.S. to turn over the day-to-day management of the technical backbone of the Internet to ICANN, which is an independent, multistakeholder institution. The thinking was that the Internet would never truly become a sustainable, lasting global institution unless its management was globally shared.

And that strategy is correct: The only way the U.S. can truly win is by letting go of the Internet, not holding on to it. But of course, and in this we must be honest too, “letting go” also brings with it significant risks and challenges and the potential for losing the Internet altogether.

The process began last March, when the Obama administration announced that it would attempt to move one part of the governance system – the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, or IANA, which is part of the domain name system – from the Department of Commerce to ICANN by the fall of 2015. In the last several months, members of the U.S. Congress have begun to respond to the plan and inject themselves into the debate. Many are interested in setting clear conditions for the planned transfer in September. The administration should be eager for Congress to wrestle with this issue and work to create a broad bipartisan consensus for how to proceed: Given how important these matters are to the future of the U.S., Congress has to step up and do its part to ensure we have a vibrant, free and open Internet for generations to come.

Among the more promising contributions to this still nascent debate came last week in a proposal from GOP Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Roy Blunt of Missouri and Democratic Sens. Chris Coons of Delaware and Mark Warner of Virginia. In it they lay out seven reasonable conditions ICANN must meet prior to the transfer, including that the institution itself must become more accountable to the stakeholder community (one way to do this is to have formal “members” representing the various constituencies). It is not only a smart contribution to the debate, but that it was bipartisan puts ICANN and the administration on notice that Congress is now forcefully moving into the debate about how to keep the Internet open and free. And for good reason: In recent months there have been legitimate reasons for concern about institutional mission creep and foreign government capture of ICANN, something the U.S. simply cannot allow.

While Congress should engage in the coming months, it also must act with far more caution and dexterity than it often does on the global stage. Allowing one, single, free and open Internet to develop across the world in the years ahead will require more countries and stakeholders to view the Internet not as a threat to their way of life but as an enabler of better times. The more the Internet is seen as a tool of American business and government the less likely many will be to invest in this process over time.

What this means is that ensuring future Internet governance is both more broadly shared and successful is going to be hard and will require very high level and agile stewardship from future administrations and Congressional leaders. It is not something that can or should be left to assistant secretaries or backbenchers in Congress. It is literally one of the most significant tasks our government has, and must be approached with far greater seriousness than it has been in recent years.

Getting this year’s IANA transfer right is one of the most important things our government will do in 2015, and will be a test of our system. There should be a vigorous national debate, and Congress should set clear and reasonable conditions for the transfer. If the conditions are not met, the U.S. government should be willing to postpone the transfer date. But if they are met, it is similarly critical that we keep our word to the global community and allow the transfer to happen. Our policy makers have an enormous responsibility to the billions of people around the world who rely on the Internet every day to get this right.

As I’ve written elsewhere, maintaining a free and open Internet for future generations simply has to become one of the American government’s highest priorities now. Doing so will require working through complex issues like privacy, cybersecurity, cross-border data flows and other trade related issues, censorship and overzealous government regulation and of course deliberate efforts by more repressive regimes to weaken the Internet’s global reach. The Internet as we know it today is far more fragile than many users understand, and it is going to take extraordinary American leadership in the coming decades to ensure that the promise of this globally transformative network is realized for all the people of the world.

n the near term the administration should be working closely with Congress, the Internet stakeholder community and allied governments to ensure that this delicate transition of one piece of Internet governance is successful. If we can’t get something like the IANA transfer right, it is hard to see how the American vision of one global Internet accessed by all will prevail in the fast changing world of the 21st century. 

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