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Since
the 9-11 terrorist attacks on America, perhaps
the strongest consensus to emerge seems
to be that our government needs to learn
how to better “connect the dots” when threats
to our security are concerned.
Congress
and the Administration should apply that
lesson by focusing national attention on
a looming threat facing the Internet. The
Internet infrastructure, built almost entirely
by Americans, combines some of America's
most envied achievements: cutting-edge technology,
the free flow of information, and promotion
of open systems of commerce over which trillions
of dollars a year in transactions now travel.
But
as integral as the Internet has become to
our economy and our daily lives, Americans
by and large don't have a very good understanding
what the Internet is. And if we don't understand
who runs it or how it works, it's hard for
us to imagine how to protect it from threats.
This
is a problem we can and must fix. American
policymakers need to focus on threats to
the Internet before, not after, a threat
presents itself.
First,
most policymakers probably do not know who
governs the Internet. The job of Internet
traffic cop is in the hands of one of the
strangest, least-accountable organizations
ever devised in Washington . It's called
the Internet Corporation on Assigned Names
and Numbers, or ICANN. ICANN was the creation
of Ira Magaziner – the famed mastermind
of the Byzantine Clinton health care plan.
ICANN is a government-chartered, non-profit
corporation in California that is funded
by compulsory industry dues. It is not accountable
to Congress, is not subject to the Freedom
of Information Act or the Administrative
Procedure Act, and is not even accountable
to the industry it is meant to serve.
If
anything, ICANN seems most interested in
being accountable to the opinions of foreign
governments and foreign industry. ICANN
holds meetings in exotic locales where it
holds court, often thumbing its nose at
American interests while currying favor
with America 's foreign competitors. ICANN
acts like an American teenager with a wad
of parental cash and a Eurorail pass, defiantly
out to prove its freedom from the American
interests that pay its way.
As
part of its effort to distance itself from
America, ICANN is seriously considering
awarding control of the most technologically
sophisticated and financially important
domain name – the dot.net domain, which
is currently managed by California-based
VeriSign – to a foreign firm which has no
experience handling anything as large and
complex as the dot.net systems. The dot.nets
are the domain names over which flow the
largest amounts of traffic, the largest
financial transactions, and the largest
chunks of Internet traffic that need special
security or special routing instructions.
ICANN
has a history of awarding contracts to inexperienced
bidders. It awarded control of the dot.org
domain to a firm that had no ability to
service the contract itself, but promised
to find the talent and the equipment if
it got the contract. That sort of gamble
may be fine for the nonprofit, dot.org world,
but when we are talking about the hundreds
of millions of communications and transactions
running over the dot.net system every day,
we need to get serious.
The
company that is now running the dot.net
system is so large and sophisticated that
it has actually managed the entire bulk
of worldwide Internet traffic when other,
less sophisticated systems temporarily went
down. If ICANN awards the dot.net contract
to a foreign, untested competitor, will
they be willing or able to pull off that
sort of worldwide rescue? Or will they be
madly treading water just to handle their
own traffic?
Most
importantly, what if the dot.net system
or one of the American companies that depends
on it is threatened with a massive attack?
Will a less-sophisticated foreign
company be able to withstand the attack?
Even scarier, why should we think a foreign
firm would consider an attack against American
interests a top priority?
American
policymakers must connect these dots as
expertly as the current American Internet
system managers have been connecting their
“dots” – the dot.coms, dot.nets, and the
dot.mils. Because if and when an Internet
failure comes, Americans will demand answers.
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