Lawfare Blog: “The Continuing Struggle for Control in Cyberspace—And the Deterioration of Western Influence”

Lawfare Blog contributor Paul Rosenzweig recently wrote a great post explaining the struggle for control over the Internet and the potential implications of shifting governing authority to the international community.

This line from the post really gives you a sense of Rosenzweig’s opinion on the importance of the outcome of this struggle:

As a world community our dependence upon and interdependence with the cyber domain is growing so fast that our conception of its size can’t keep up with the reality of it.  How we govern this distributed and dynamic space is profoundly important to the future prosperity of humankind.

Rosenzweig then fleshes out the current Internet governance structure, which is mainly defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).  These organizations, as Rosenzweig explains, presently set the technical protocols and standards for network operation and are responsible for assigning names in the cyberspace addressing directory.

But some around the world think [the organizations’] policy making is highly influenced by the nations that are most technologically reliant on the [I]nternet and have contributed the most to its development and growth—nations like the United States and other western democracies.

Non-western countries have lobbied, therefore, for an entirely different organization to be put in charge of domain management—the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which is part of the United Nations.  According to the Lawfare Blog post, these nations make the argument that shifting the governing authority to an entity such as the ITU would effectively minimize US global dominance and western influence by making the Internet a conventional international process instead.

At the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), hosted in Dubai a little over a year ago, these opinions were exposed.  Western nations supported the continuation of a traditional, multi-stakeholder approach while authoritarian regimes, such as Russia, China, and Iran, called for amending the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs) such that they would become legal foundation for control over web content.

Of course, unanimous consent was never reached on the ITR issue in Dubai.  As Rosenzweig explains:

As with most international agreements, the ITRs must be ratified by individual nations; can be subject to reservations; and then must be implemented by domestic law.  The ITRs will take effect on January 1, 2015—and they will only bind nations that ratified them.

Notably, the “nations that ratified the[]” ITRs do not include, for example, the U.S. or the European Union.

That brings us to what Rosenzweig thinks about all this:

Indeed, with all due respect, those who want to transfer regulatory authority over the cyber domain to the ITU or who are unconcerned about that possibility are making a mistake of significant proportions.  At best, such a transfer would diminish Internet freedom.

How? Rosenzweig outlines at least four possibilities (herein oversimplified, but I invite you to take a look at his full explanation on Lawfare Blog):

1. The desire for international control could be fueled by the sovereigns’ desire to “stifle dissent and choke off the new medium of communication that has made maintaining the status quo hard.”
2. The ITR outcome from Dubai allows authoritarian regimes to “ground their repressive actions in an appeal to international law.”
3. The economic value of the cyber domain would be significantly depleted if it is run internationally.  “Given the scale of the enterprise,” Rosenzweig explains, “the mechanisms for multinational cooperation are too cumbersome, hierarchical and slow to be of much use in the development of international standards.”
4. The push for transferring governance “increases the risk of polarizing an already contentious domain even further.”

If that’s the “best”-case scenario, Rosenzweig believes,

At worst, it might fracture the network altogether, breaking the universality of the interconnected cyber domain.