Smaller, less devel­oped coun­tries are start­ing to gripe to the U.N. (also known as “Your Future One World Gov­ern­ment”) about the influ­ence that the USA has over how the Inter­net is run worldwide.

Key issues range from adding new top-level domains, assign­ing blocks of IP addresses, and oper­at­ing the root servers that direct all Inter­net traf­fic. Other respon­si­bil­i­ties that would fall under the umbrella of this new orga­ni­za­tion would include Inter­net sur­veil­lance, “con­sumer pro­tec­tion,” and per­haps even the power to tax domain names to pay for “uni­ver­sal access.” “Uni­ver­sal access”, accord­ing to U.N. doc­u­ments, sounds like the phone tax that you pay to pro­vide Inter­net ser­vice to schools.

Some of the com­plaints are on their face, patently silly –

Syria: “There’s more and more spam every day. Who are the vic­tims? Devel­op­ing and least-developed coun­tries, too. There is no seri­ous inten­tion to stop this spam by those who are the trans­porters of the spam, because they benefit…The only solu­tion is for us to buy equip­ment from the coun­tries which send this spam in order to deal with spam. How­ever, this, we believe, is not acceptable.”

Yes, we should have to take direc­tions from Syria, lover of ter­ror­ists, on how to com­bat spam. Spam doesn’t just affect devel­op­ing nations. It affects every­body. Please.

Part of the Bush Administration’s response to this call for inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion included their stat­ing that the Root servers would remain under U.S. con­trol no mat­ter what was decided.

Beyond the usual levers of diplo­matic pres­sure and pub­lic kvetch­ing, Brazil and China could choose what amounts to the nuclear option: a frag­mented root. That means a new top-level domain would not be approved by ICANN—but would be rec­og­nized and used by large por­tions of the rest of the world. The down­side, of course, is that the nuclear option could cre­ate a Balka­nized Inter­net where two com­put­ers find dif­fer­ent Web sites at the same address.

“It wasn’t until now” that a frag­mented root was being talked about, says Mil­ton Mueller, a pro­fes­sor at Syra­cuse Uni­ver­sity and par­tic­i­pant in the Inter­net Gov­er­nance Project. “China and other coun­tries might be pur­su­ing responses that lead to fragmentation.”

Such an out­come remains remote, but it could hap­pen. That pos­si­bil­ity means an obscure debate about Inter­net gov­er­nance has sud­denly become sur­pris­ingly important.

Know this – the U.N. wants con­trol of the Inter­net. They may do what­ever they feel they have to do to wrest con­trol of it from the United States.

shud­der