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By Rana Foroohar
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Sometimes it's tough to remember what life was like before the Internet. In those long-ago-seeming days, phone calls were expensive, document-shipping frequent, and we actually had to troll for random information in (gasp!) books. The Web made everything better. Suddenly, we could connect as often as we liked, for as long as we liked, with anyone and everything. Data became a commodity. Life was good. That was Internet 1.0. But consider Internet 2.0, currently in development. No longer an egalitarian utopia, it has become much like the rest of society--divided by class and geography. And its growing fragmentation threatens the smooth operation of the global economy.
Until now the Internet has been a uniquely bottom-up, nonhierarchical, seamless form of global communication. But all that is changing, as governments, multinational companies and individuals battle for control over the digital landscape. Nations are arguing over how the Web should be governed and regulated, dragging old foreign-policy grudges into cyberspace. Countries like China, Iran, North Korea and Vietnam are coming up with new ways to censor citizens' online communications, often with the help of Western multinationals. At least one, Iran, has threatened to set up its own alternative-reality Internet--as protest groups already have--the kind of thing that could wreak havoc with global Web traffic, and create confusion among users who no longer knew if the sites they peruse were legitimate.
Even as they deregulate other industries, European bureaucrats are using taxpayer money to create national Internet champions. Telecoms in the United States and Europe are battling high-tech behemoths such as Google and Microsoft over who should reap the financial benefits of the digital superhighway. Poor countries are begging rich ones for better online infrastructure, while activists urge governments and companies alike to keep Web access free and unrestricted. The bottom line? Instead of a borderless, well-functioning, economically efficient communications network, the Internet is poised to become a quagmire of special interests, competing political agendas and international bureaucracy. "Sadly, it looks like the period in which the Internet functions seamlessly is over," says Vint Cerf, one of the Internet's better-known creators, now "chief Internet evangelist" for Google.
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The Balkanization of the Net has been a long time coming. Its roots lie in the system's unusual beginnings as an all-American, public-private hybrid. The Internet started as a U.S. Defense Department communications grid designed to survive a nuclear war. Later, in the mid-1990s, when it became clear that this system had important commercial applications, a group of techie academics organized a kind of governing body to oversee its growth. Even then, there were battles over how much control the government should maintain, and how much should be distributed in a more decentralized way in the private sector. All this was largely done under the public radar, and almost entirely within the United States. "Foreign governments by and large hadn't understood the technology, and hadn't paid much attention to the Net until it was pretty far along," notes Milton Mueller, a historian and Syracuse University computer-science professor. "Once they woke up and realized that the U.S. was in complete control, commercially and policywise, they became alarmed."
The situation was unprecedented. Telecoms had always been under national control, and an international body, the International Telecommunications Union, coordinated things on the global level. But on the Web, American companies like IBM were helping make policy, U.S. start-ups were getting rich charging fees for domain names, and the U.S. Commerce Department, which was eventually put in charge of the whole thing, had the final say on how things were run. (It outsourced daily administration to a private California company called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, which Cerf now chairs.) "That's when the real power struggles began," says Mueller.
Those battles are taking place along predictable geopolitical lines. Most of the world, especially the developing world, is angry that the United States still holds so much sway over what is now the planet's most crucial technological resource. Fanning the rage, ICANN, which has the sole power to approve top-level domain names, like .com, .net and so on, has been slow to create local language domains, making it tougher for people who speak languages not based on Roman characters to use the Net. This issue was front and center at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis last year, where some developing countries protested Western hegemony. "A private California company simply shouldn't be running this system that we all depend on," says José Marcos Viana, one of the Brazilian delegates at the meeting.
Brazil, which operates the vast majority of its tax-collection system online, has legitimate reason to be concerned about the possibility of politically motivated cyber-snooping by the United States. What's more, says Viana, "It's appalling to us that we have to go to the U.S. government to get approval to create new domain names." There were protests over ICANN's recent proposals to create an .xxx domain name for pornographic content, which many countries found offensive. Some, like Iran and the Arab nations, were concerned that Washington might decide at some point to simply turn off their national domain names for political reasons, cutting them off the Web entirely.
The danger comes from countries' efforts to defend themselves against that possibility. Ambassador David Gross, the State Department official who led the U.S. delegation, says there is no basis for such fears. "While it's not even clear that we could turn a country 'off' the Net, we have no incentive to do it," he says. "It would destroy the stability and reliability of the system." That hasn't stopped Iran from threatening to create their own alternative version of the Internet, similar to those already run by anti-American tech activists in Europe. It's easy to do: you simply copy the information on the 13 key servers around the world that form the root of all Web traffic (these are publicly accessible). One German group, the Open Root Server Network, has already done so, in protest over U.S. actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. ORSN has no plans to add new information or misinformation to its version of the Net--it has vowed not to make any politically motivated changes on its servers. But it's completely possible that aggrieved governments, say, could set up new versions of ibm.com or whitehouse.gov. Once that happens, Internet traffic could be misrouted, and people could end up on false or misleading Web sites without even realizing it. What's more, the ambiguity could slow servers or stall great swaths of the Net (minor glitches have already occurred). And the real worry is that entire nations will go their own way, which could cause the whole system to collapse.
China, too, is fed up with ICANN's delay on local language domains, and has already created a few of its own. More important, China's efforts to police its Netizens are, in effect, creating a parallel Web. Google, eager to grab market share from the local Chinese search engine baidu.com, has come under particular fire for tweaking its system so that users in China who search, say, "Falun Gong" will get only state-approved, anti-Falun Gong Web sites. China has exported such censorship techniques to many other countries; taken to its logical extreme, this is another way of undercutting the global unity of the system. Such efforts undermine not only personal freedom but economic benefits as well. Once the Internet stops at national borders, e-commerce starts looking a lot more like old-fashioned retail.
Western countries like France and Germany fear digital giants like Google for another reason: their role as cultural gatekeepers. The two nations recently agreed to pour several billion euros' worth of taxpayer money into creating a new slate of state-funded digital champions, including a "Euro-Google" called Quaero, which would supposedly be more linguistically inclusive than its better-known competitor. More competition is a good thing, but such projects drain resources from areas in which Europe might be better suited to take a leadership position--such as peer-to-peer communications and mobile development. And the result could isolate consumers rather than connect them, in the same way that France's ill-fated Minitel system delayed that country's forays onto the Web.
Governments are not the only ones to blame. Telecoms in both the United States and Europe are now investing tens of billions of dollars in faster broadband pipes that will be able to deliver music, movies and television over the Internet in real time. These are not cheap. Craig Bernstein, a media analyst for Bernstein Research in New York, estimates that the new high-bandwidth services being built by the telecoms will cost about $80 per month per customer to deliver. Make that $112 per month if you want television over the Net, and $560 if you want the TV in high definition.
The telecoms say that content providers like Google, eBay, Yahoo and others should share some of that load, and want to start charging these companies higher rates to guarantee reliable delivery of their new video-rich content. But the tech companies and many digital-rights NGOs say that overturning "Net neutrality" will create a two-tier Internet, in which users will have to watch whatever the richest companies decide to air, rather like going back to the pre-cable era of network television. The hierarchy could also hinder technological innovation by increasing the cost of start-ups, and changing the whole Web paradigm of forming companies quickly, and on a shoestring. "Telecoms didn't invent search, or e-mail, or ecommerce, or blogging, or any of the killer apps that drive Net traffic today," notes David Isenberg, a fellow at the Berkman Center.
The question of who will pay for the information superhighway isn't limited to companies in the United States and Europe. It's also an issue between rich and poor countries. As the Net becomes ever more important to prosperity and global inclusion, the decade-old problem of the digital divide is becoming more pressing. Developing countries, for example, are asking developed ones to help them maintain and upgrade their telecommunications networks as a form of aid--an issue brought up in Tunis but overshadowed by the hoopla over U.S. control of the Net. Tarek Kanel, the Egyptian minister of Communications, wants the United States and the EU to help pay the $10 million to $15 million per year that it costs his country to maintain the Internet backbone linking it to the rest of the world. "We all use these links--we should all pay for them," he says. While Western companies have traditionally been keen to build fiber-optic bridges into potentially rich markets like Asia, they have much less interest in doing so in the Mideast and Africa, where there's less commercial upside.
Who will pay? How will they pay? Who gets to govern, and who decides what information can be suppressed? The questions are growing as fast as the Internet itself. Even as the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee defeated a proposal to maintain Net neutrality in late April, the EU has sent warning signals to telecoms, letting them know that it won't stand for any moves that create an unequal playing field for new digital players. As countries push for more local-language domain names, tricky political questions are emerging. Who has rights to the Chinese-language version of .cn--China or Taiwan? Who gets first dibs on names in Farsi characters--the Iranians or the Afghans? Do Western companies that hold domain names in English automatically get the international rights, or should those go to local people?
While such questions might seem trivial, they are part of a larger shift that could have huge implications. The Balkanization of the Internet could well undermine all our livelihoods. The unprecedented global wealth creation of the past 15 years has happened in large part because the Internet has helped us reach across borders. Clearly the Internet must move beyond its U.S.-centric roots, but it's just as clear that it shouldn't look like the United Nations, or like China, or like a for-profit enterprise. Figuring out the right balance between commerce, culture and connectivity won't be an easy task. But there could be no better use for our global bandwidth right now.
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