IGP Blog

The "exceptional" status of IP address governance

Milton Mueller — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:12:00 -0500

Just today the Number Resource Organization released a review report of the Address Supporting Organization (ASO). Few people noticed or cared. But this report, which is objective and thorough if a bit dull, starts to raise issues that are of great significance to the future of ICANN and Internet governance. More specifically, it raises some unfinished business from 1998: the status of IP address governance in the ICANN regime.

US memo: ITU's Dubai meeting not likely to affect Internet Governance

Milton Mueller — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:06:00 -0500

A memo from the US government dated January 23, 2012, makes it clear that the ITU World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12) to be held in Dubai this December poses little threat of a "takeover" of the Internet by intergovernmental institutions.

We are all Internet exceptionalists now

Milton Mueller — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:26:00 -0500

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its defeat call attention to a delicious irony in public discourse on Internet governance. Even those who don’t want the Internet to be an exception from traditional forms of regulation and law are forced to admit that something new and exceptional must be done to bring it under control. Reinforcing the irony, these attempts by the anti-exceptionalists to subordinate the Internet to established institutions immediately locks them into conflict with a highly mobilized, highly transnational community of Internet users and service providers who vow to resist those controls. The resistance comes precisely because the mobilized community believes that the controls threaten to fundamentally alter its status as an open, innovative and – dare we say it – exceptional space. In other words, we are all Internet exceptionalists now.

ARIN propagandizes the bankruptcy bar

Milton Mueller — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:45:00 -0500

The January 5 issue of BNA’s Bankruptcy Law Reporter (24 BBLR 32) contains a remarkable article by the attorneys for the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). It poses as a neutral, informative article about how trustees for firms entering bankruptcy court can “obtain the highest value” for their Internet Protocol address blocks when they are put up for sale. But one should be cautious of free legal advice to third parties when it is offered by lawyers hired by ARIN and keenly attuned to its organizational self-interest. The advice will not help IP sellers maximize their value; it is designed, instead to help ARIN preserve its monopoly on brokering the transfer market.

NPR story on ICANN and Internet governance: way off target

Milton Mueller — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 23:46:00 -0500

National Public Radio in the U.S. did a feature piece on ICANN, presumably because January 12 is the day it starts its program to open up the domain name space to hundreds of new top level names. Yet what should have been a story about the pros and cons of new TLDs and ICANN’s political struggles with U.S.-based intellectual property interests and the legislators they influenced, became yet another story about…wait for it… how the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is threatening to take over the Internet!

ICANN must not back down

Milton Mueller — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:48:00 -0500

ICANN’s plan to open up the domain name space to new top level domains is scheduled to begin January 12, 2012. Now there is a cynical, illegitimate last-second push by a few corporate interests in the United States to derail that process. That group’s demands must be rebuffed, unambiguously and finally. ICANN must start implementing the new TLD program on January 12 as scheduled. ICANN must keep its promise to those who participated in its processes in good faith.

Iran, Israel and DPI: The misdirection of resistance to surveillance technology Part 2

Milton Mueller — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 02:23:00 -0500

A new article by Bloomberg exposes the presence of bandwidth optimization equipment in the network of an Iranian Internet Service Provider. The equipment comes from an Israeli company, Allot Communications. This is treated as a perfect example of how governments need to crack down on the sale of threatening technology to dictatorships by Western companies. But when the actual facts of the case come out, you will find that it proves the opposite.

Technology as symbol: Is resistance to surveillance technology being misdirected?

Milton Mueller — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 15:36:00 -0500

Activists and investigative journalists are highlighting the linkage between modern surveillance technologies and repressive governments. The emerging narrative around surveillance technology provides the perfect frame for public activism. You have a clear bad guy – a Gadhafi, an Assad, the Iranian theocrats, the Chinese Communist Party. You have a symbolic token, a technology, which links the bad guys and their bad actions to reachable actors – the corporate vendors – who are part of our own society and jurisdiction. You can then campaign on a simple moral impulse – the reachable actors must not be allowed to aid, abet or profit from the violence and political injustice of the bad guys. This in turn leads to what seems like a simple and effective policy response – to sever the link between reachable actors and the bad guys by somehow banning or regulating the transfer of this technology on a global basis. This blog post offers a critique of this budding movement, turning a critical eye upon a righteous cause.

US Senate Plays Game of 22 questions with NTIA

Milton Mueller — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 01:00:00 -0500

A powerful Senator is starting to ask NTIA questions about IP addressing. On October 4, 2011, The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee's chairman, Senator Jay Rockefeller, sent a challenging but private letter to the administration official responsible for overseeing ICANN, Lawrence E. Strickling. IGP has obtained a copy of the letter through the US Freedom of Information Act. The letter, which poses 22 tough questions, focuses not on the old controversies related to new gTLDs, but on the IANA contract.

In Important Case, RIPE-NCC seeks legal clarity on how it responds to foreign court orders

M. Mueller, M. van Eeten, & B. Kuerbis — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 10:57:00 -0500

An international law enforcement action against a large botnet that used the DNSChanger malware is making pathbreaking Internet governance law. A lawsuit initiated by Regional Internet Registry RIPE-NCC may set an important legal precedent. At issue is the extent to which an IP address registries can be used as tools of transnational law enforcement. It has significant implications for RPKI and secure BGP deployment as well.

The new IANA: An important milestone

Milton Mueller — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 15:14:00 -0500

Is there such a thing as a Freudian typo? If so, the new IANA contract certainly contains one. On page 9, it requires the Contractor to promptly notify the NTIA of "any outrages." They meant outages, of course. But we like the proposed language much, much better. IGP has been almost solely responsible for ICANN's outrage notification function for the past six years, and we would be happy to share that duty with others. All kidding aside, the new IANA contract solicitation, which was posted by the U.S. Commerce Department November 10, represents a milestone in ICANN's relationship to the U.S. government.

Milestone for civil society representation in ICANN

Milton Mueller — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 14:11:00 -0500

The Dakar meeting was an important milestone in ICANN’s development. It marked the completion of the reform of the GNSO and the finalization of the new Noncommercial Stakeholders Group (NCSG). If you support the “multi-stakeholder” model of Internet governance and you think representatives of business interests should be balanced with representatives of public interest groups and nonprofits, then the fate of the NCSG should be important to you (however boring the bureaucratic details may be). Just before the Dakar meeting the NCSG concluded the first Stakeholder Group-wide election for its Chair and for 4 GNSO Council seats. the GNSO Council has now - finally - been rebalanced and reformed. While most of the progress is irreversible, some of the old controversies are still brewing.

A United Nations Committee for Internet-Related Policies? A fair assessment

Milton Mueller — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 16:56:00 -0400

The government of India has taken the next step in evolving the IBSA proposal for a new UN body on Internet governance. It has proposed a "UN Committee for Internet-related policies" (CIRP). Of course, the CIRP is highly controversial, and is raising fears that the "UN is out to take over the Internet." Given the inherent tension between networks and states, that is not a threat to be taken lightly. Nevertheless, it is important to understand precisely what was proposed, and careful description seems to be lacking from some of the current dialogue. So this article tries to provide an unbiased analysis of what CIRP is, and isn't.

Full responses to the Hindu on the IBSA Proposal

Milton Mueller — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 01:18:00 -0400

A reporter from the Indian newspaper The Hindu recently solicited my reaction to the India, Brazil and South Africa (IBSA) proposal for a new UN-based oversight body for Internet governance. The questions he sent were very well drafted and stimulating, so my responses far exceeded what he could use in the article he wrote. So I am publishing my full answers here.

Of canaries and coal mines: What happened at VeriSign?

Milton Mueller — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 09:40:00 -0400

Too many techies still don't understand the concept of due process, and opportunistic law enforcement agencies, who tend to view due process constraints as an inconvenience, are very happy to take advantage of that. That's the lesson to draw from VeriSign's sudden withdrawal of a proposed new "domain name anti-abuse policy" yesterday.

Syria: the realities of intergovernmental "oversight" on display

Milton Mueller — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 09:06:00 -0400

It appears that the proposal by India, Brazil and South Africa (IBSA) to bring the wonders of United Nations-centered governmental oversight to the Internet did not fare so well when subjected to public discussion at the Nairobi Internet Governance Forum. But even the IBSA critics seemed to be curiously detached from the inherent incompatibility between national sovereignty and a global Internet.

Just as the IGF met in Kenya, the world's governments were showing how hopeless intergovernmental institutions are when it comes to protecting freedom, law and order. I am referring to the attempt by the United Nations to impose sanctions on Syria.

IBSA advocates who call for strong governmental presence in Internet governance like to warn us of the terrible abuses of multinational "monopoly" corporations. Aside from the fact that even the most dominant of these corporations, Google, does not have any thing near to a monopoly of search, much less of online advertising, the harms and risks Google's actions pose pale in comparison to what is happening in Syria. The Syrian state poses a very clear and obvious instance of abuse and chaos. The Syrian government is killing its own people as they attempt to join the Arab Spring and challenge the Assad dictatorship. Whether you are pro-West or not, whether you are Muslim, Christian, Hindu or atheist, socialist or free marketeer, it's clear that Syria needs attention.

So it is fair to ask, how well have intergovernmental institutions responded to this problem? We all know the answer. Governments were paralyzed. They were unable to agree. And perhaps surprisingly, our friends in IBSA decided to stand with the Assad regime and resist any outside interference by the UN. Writing in Al Arabiya news, Raghida Dergham asks "Why did the BRICs stand like a solid separation wall to protect the regime in Syria, while up to three thousand civilians have fallen victim to repression and killing?" And why did IBSA countries support Russia and China? She suggests an answer: what brings together the IBSA countries, "is their ambition of obtaining a permanent seat at the Security Council."

What matters to states, you see, is not justice or peace but their own power and the national interests of their own ruling elites. It's true of the U.S., of France, of China and Russia - and it's true of IBSA. In a world with 180 or so national sovereigns, it's ridiculous beyond belief to see sovereignty-based international institutions as an appropriate venue for finding constructive and cooperative solutions to the problems of Internet governance. If you didn't believe that before, just ask yourself: if governments can't agree on how to respond to mayhem and killing in Syria, how good do you think that kind of an environment will be at addressing the complex technical and economic issues of the Internet?

Lifting the Veil on How GAC works: the UDRP Review incident

Milton Mueller — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 12:20:00 -0400

In multistakeholder settings, national governments often claim that they should have special status because they represent “the public interest” in policy deliberations. But how true is that claim? Do governments actually intervene in these processes with a judicious, impartial eye toward policy solutions that are the best for everyone? Or do they tilt the scales toward the stakeholder group that lobbies them most aggressively and is most likely to give their bosses campaign contributions? A recent incident in ICANN provides some interesting clues as to how governments really work. We now know that ICANN’s Governmental Advisory committee (GAC) shared a draft policy statement with only one stakeholder group in the GNSO – the trademark lobby – and kept all the other stakeholder groups out of the loop. the incident holds important lessons for those with the naive view that governments are "just another stakeholder" in multistakeholder processes.

European Commission Paper #5: ccTLDs and yet another power grab

Milton Mueller — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 11:48:00 -0400

In the 4th paper of our series analyzing the European Commission papers on ICANN, we examine their paper on country code top level domains (ccTLDs). As usual, the EC’s primary concern is not the interest of the Internet-using public or the health and vitality of the internet, but the privileges and powers of itself and its member governments.

Russia & China propose UN General Assembly Resolution on "information security"

Milton Mueller — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 09:36:00 -0400

On September 12 China, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan released a Resolution for the UN General Assembly entitled "International code of conduct for information security." The resolution proposes a voluntary 12 point code of conduct based on "the need to prevent the potential use of information and communication technologies for purposes that are inconsistent with the objectives of maintaining international stability and security and may adversely affect the integrity of the infrastructure within States..." The Code seems to be intended to preserve and protect national sovereignty in information and communication.

India, Brazil and South Africa call for creation of "new global body" to control the Internet

Milton Mueller — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 17:35:00 -0400

On the 1st and 2nd of September in Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian foreign relations ministry, the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) and the Center for Technology & Society (CTS/FGV) held what they called a “Seminar” on Global Internet Governance. But while “seminar” has an educational, even academic ring to it, this event was more than that. It was actually a preparatory conference for a major political initiative regarding Internet control. On September 13, the three important developing country governments – India, Brazil and South Africa (IBSA) – who ran the conference issued a statement that shows they are openly abandoning the distributed model of the Internet and rejecting networked governance and even the new multi-stakeholder models of governmental involvement. Now they are openly pushing for a new coalition of states to control the Internet. If Sarkozy wanted to "civilize" the Internet, IBSA wants to intergovernmentalize it.

People in a glass house throwing stones: EC ICANN Papers 3 & 4

Milton Mueller — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 08:34:00 -0400

In ICANN Papers 3 and 4, the European Commission goes after ICANN’s finances and corporate governance. The first thing one notices is that both papers are brief and superficial; it’s as if the EC has only just discovered a topic that has been intensely debated since 1998, namely ICANN’s institutional design. It seems not to have read a single serious paper about it. The poor results show why one should not make policy the way the EC has in this case: in isolation, in anger and without any public consultation.

"Do not complicate routing security with Voodoo Economics"

Brenden Kuerbis — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 09:56:00 -0400

That was the eye-catching subject line in a recent note from Randy Bush to the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) about secure Border Gateway Protocol (S-BGP). His note critiqued a paper, Let the Market Drive Deployment: A Strategy for Transitioning to BGP Security, which was presented recently at SIGCOMM and NANOG meetings. The paper argued that under certain conditions, the transition to secure Internet routing could be driven by ISPs' incentive to increase their revenue-generating traffic. But as Bush noted, focusing on the economic incentives affecting ISP routing decisions in light of S-BGP may be missing the point. For him, the problem of secure routing deployment is grounded in economic and institutional issues around RPKI, something we identified in a paper earlier this year. While there certainly is a need to understand the micro-foundations surrounding adoption of Internet security standards like RPKI, S-BGP or DNSSEC, understanding and resolving the institutional problems must happen simultaneously.

The second EC ICANN Paper: How low can they go?

Milton Mueller — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 13:48:00 -0400

You cannot have a global manager of the domain name system without some kind of agreed policy for adding new top level domains to the root. As a matter of economic policy, the DNS system should allow organizations to apply for new domains, and ideally the choices of users and consumers should determine the fate of new registries and new names. The new TLD program is also important because domain names are a form of expression on the Internet. Any policy that regulates the creation or operation of new domains based on their meaning or the content hosted under the names is, de facto, a form of globalized content regulation.

In its second ICANN paper, entitled "New gTLD Process," the EC has taken the worst possible position on both of those aspects of new TLD policy. The EC Paper is radically inimical to freedom of expression and would erect huge, needless economic barriers to entry. It is also destructive institutionally: it proposes to subordinate Internet community self-governance to hierarchical control by nation-states and replace ICANN’s new gTLD policy with something concocted in secret by a handful of unelected bureaucrats. In this second installment of our analysis we deconstruct the EC's paper on new gTLDs.

Payback time: The European Commission papers on ICANN

Milton Mueller — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:38:00 -0400

The most notable thing about the EC Papers on ICANN is that they are designed to completely subordinate ICANN as an institution. We have not seen such a comprehensive attack by a government on ICANN since the World Summit on the Information Society. We now have no less than six papers from the EC attacking almost every aspect of ICANN, from the growth in its staff to the new TLD program to its handling of ccTLDs. Moreover, the papers are clearly targeted at influencing the US government’s redraft of the IANA contract in ways that would be deeply unhealthy. While ICANN could certainly use some reforms, this is nothing but a destructive act of revenge rather than a good-faith effort to reform the organization or improve its policies. To support that assertion, IGP blog will go through the EC papers one by one, and show what a flimsy pretext they provide for what is, in reality, nothing more than an attempt by an intergovernmental entity to punish ICANN for not bowing to its will.

Anything interesting about Internet governance in Wikileaks?

Milton Mueller — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 13:09:00 -0400

Not much. There are some interesting things about copyright. The leaked cables are from the foreign policy branches rather than the Commerce Department, so most of the juicy ICANN-related stuff is not in there. Searching for "ICANN" produces 39 documents, all but two of them unclassified. Some of the most interesting date back to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and the debate it sparked over US control of the root.

International trade in IP address blocks

Milton Mueller — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 12:39:00 -0400

Here is more evidence of how the emergence of a private market for IPv4 addresses is creating concern at ARIN and driving policy change. Note that in my interview with private address broker Addrex, published here a week ago, its President Charles Lee noted that large ISPs in the Asia Pacific region were showing strong buyer interest in legacy address blocks currently sitting idle in North America. This poses a problem for the current RIR system. The RIRs are organized around exclusive territorial regions and their policies basically prohibit inter-regional sales of address blocks. A private broker dealing in legacy address space, however, is not subject to those constraints. Once again, an emergent market subtly disrupts the establish institutional regime. ARIN is, evidently, scrambling to catch up. A new proposal was submitted to ARIN's policy development process just yesterday. Entitled "ARIN-prop-156 Update 8.3 to allow inter-RIR transfers" it would allow inter-regional market transfers.

ARIN and Vixie get nervous about competition

Milton Mueller — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 13:59:00 -0400

Alternative address trading platforms are gaining traction. The Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) are worried. Paul Vixie, the Chair of ARIN's Board, has written an article in ACM Queue attacking "those who would unilaterally supplant or redraw the existing Internet resource governance or allocation systems." The publication of this article is a sign of a growing policy debate around the reform of IP address registries in the age of IPv4 exhaustion. Unfortunately, Vixie's arguments show that he is disconnected from the economic and institutional realities of the IPv4 address regime.

The new Kaminsky bug

Milton Mueller — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 20:55:00 -0400

Dan Kaminsky seems to have rocked the cyber-world with a presentation at Black Hat in Las Vegas. The security expert received a massive amount of publicity for "releasing" - er, talking about - a free software tool he is calling N00ter. N00ter is supposed to be incredibly exciting because it can detect when an Internet service provider (ISP) is slowing down or speeding up traffic to and from a website.

We found it really hard to get excited about this.

Well, now we know where C.2.2.1.3.2 came from...

Milton Mueller — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 13:07:00 -0400

Read the comments of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) in the IANA Further Notice of Inquiry. There you will find the answer to the mystery of Section C.2.2.1.3.2. What's that, you ask? Section C.2.2.1.3.2 is a bizarre, out of the blue change to the IANA Statement of Work proposed by the U.S. Commerce Department's NTIA. It contains a call for IANA to decide whether new gTLDs that have already been approved by ICANN have "consensus support" and are "in the public interest." The proposed change is ridiculous because the IANA is supposed to be a largely mechanical process of entering unique strings into the DNS root. IGP has been in the forefront of explaining what a disaster C.2.2.1.3.2 would be. Every organization that has bothered to notice it has also opposed it in the public comments. So now we know where it came from: the trademark lobby, of course.

Will the new IANA contract politicize the IANA?

Milton Mueller — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 09:28:00 -0400

IGP filed comments on the Commerce Department's Further Notice of Inquiry on the IANA functions contract today. Our comments noted that there are elements in the proposed new IANA Statement of Work (SOW) which could radically alter the nature of the IANA functions contract.