Sometimes, even we’re surprised at some of what we read on the Wall Street Journal editorial page. This morning’s installment features an extended rant by Minnesota Republican Senator Norm Coleman, who tries to stir the pot by claiming that there is a virtual coup d’etat afoot at the United Nations to wrest control of the Internet away from the United States and ICANN, the private regulatory body controlled by the U.S.
Coleman hits the ground running, writing in his lede:
It sounds like a Tom Clancy plot. An anonymous group of international technocrats holds secretive meetings in Geneva. Their cover story: devising a blueprint to help the developing world more fully participate in the digital revolution. Their real mission: strategizing to take over management of the Internet from the U.S. and enable the United Nations to dominate and politicize the World Wide Web.
About the only thing Coleman gets right here is that there were meetings in Geneva. But the meetings he’s discussing weren’t nearly as shady as he makes them out to be — and they were held nearly two years ago, back in December 2003, something he fails to mention. The meetings were so un-secretive that the body regularly issued press releases announcing the “World Summit on the Information Society” meetings, which included a full list of those participating in the conference. The UN also set up a Web site devoted to the conference in Geneva and to one in Tunisia (coming up later this month) where a full accounting of the meetings is spelled out — including a report of who attended the meetings, webcasts of some of the speeches, statements issued during the meeting, and a chart showing which countries helped to fund the event. These meetings were about as “secretive” as soccer’s World Cup. Coleman is either deluded, or just plain not telling the truth, and his editor at the Journal apparently isn’t much interested in fact-checking.
Some background: The fact is, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the private, California-based non-profit that currently regulates the “operational stability of the Internet,” has done a great job regulating the Internet — largely because it has taken a hands-off approach. Against this, Coleman paints a dire picture of delegates at a recent meeting scheming “to transfer Internet control into the hands of intrigue-plagued bureaucracies,” and warns that “we cannot stand idly by as some governments seek to make the Internet an instrument of censorship and political suppression.”
Now, as Tim Lee recently pointed out in an informative article (dealing with a TechCentral Station piece which was essentially arguing the same thing as Coleman), “Those concerns, too, reflect an ignorance of how the Internet works. Most of the Internet’s infrastructure is privately owned and essentially none of it is owned by ICANN. ICANN has neither the means or the authority to monitor or control Internet traffic.” And just as ICANN doesn’t necessarily “control” the Internet, it takes some Tom Clancy-like thinking to believe that that’s what the UN is proposing.
That said, the UN’s proposal, which is being backed by the European Union, is pretty unappealing. Replacing a well-run, efficient, hands-off private non-profit with a top-heavy bureaucracy sounds like a recipe for disaster. And given the United Nation’s rather sorry track record in dealing with some international crises (think Rwanda, Darfur, the Iraq Oil for Food program), handing control of the governance of the Internet over to the largely ineffectual UN bureaucracy would be a bad idea.
But it’s also true, as Lee has noted — Coleman’s pyrotechnics notwithstanding — that there’s not much threat of that happening.
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.