Internet Infrastructure
The IP address space and DNS are some of the most fundamental parts of the infrastructure of the internet. Until today, I hadn’t thought about who controls them. I was browsing the early archives of Suck.com when I stumbled over an article dated September 14, 1995, which criticizes the introduction of a fee for domain names. Wait, what? Paying for domain names has always seemed like part of the natural order of things, but it wasn’t always. Before September, 1995, all .com, .edu, .gov, .net and .org domains were free. Didn’t cost a cent to register or renew. Gratis, though not libre.
If you were online in the mid-90s or before, this probably isn’t new to you, but it was to me. Upon discovering this, I jumped down the bureaucratic rabbit hole trying to make sense of who and what all these different agencies and corporations that at some point controlled these vital pieces of internet infrastructure were.
As far as I understand it, things went like this: up until 1984, mapping domain names to IP addresses was done via a single file, HOSTS.txt, that everyone had to download if they wanted to resolve domain names. The master file was kept at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). In 1984, DNS was invented. Unlike HOSTS.txt, DNS is distributed. The Defense Data Network Network Information Center (DDN-NIC) at SRI kept control over the IP space and awarding domain names until 1991, on contract for the US Department of Defense.
In September 1991, the Defense Information Systems Agency subcontracted the control and management of DDN-NIC — if you’re following along at home, this was the agency in charge of domain names and IP addresses — to the for-profit company Network Solutions, Inc. The contract was renewed in 1992 when another US official body, the National Science Foundation, awarded it to them as the only bidder on a grant to continue the work.
Until 1995, Network Solutions, Inc. was the only registrar of the aforementioned top-level domains (.com, .net, etc.), but they were handing out IPs and domain names freely as if they were candy, to companies, honest individuals and squatters alike, so the monopoly stood unchallenged. The party was paid for by the National Science Foundation, which meant that the free domains (really, the costs of keeping the DNS servers running and registering new domains) were ultimately paid for by the US tax payer. In 1995, NSF could no longer keep financing the free domain party. Around September 13, news that Network Solutions was instituting a $50 annual fee for domain names, plus a $100 one-off fee for registering a new domain leaked. Network Solutions rushed the announcement that the Suck.com column that sparked my whole quest was reacting to.
From the announcement:
Fees can be paid by check through paper mail. There also are provisions for dealing with late payments and lapsed registrations; details can be found in the written policy.
The fees will be collected by Network Solutions, Inc., of Herndon, Va., which has been funded by the NSF to be the Internet registrar since 1993.
There are several notable things here that seem unthinkable today: one, that Network Solutions is the Internet registrar, singular; another is that, ironically, the only way to pay for an internet domain is by snail-mail; you can’t pay online.
In the FAQ, we learn that 70 percent of the domain fee will go to Network Solutions for services provided; the remaining 30 percent “will be spent, under guidance from the advisory committee, to support the intellectual structure of the Internet and will be publicly accounted for.”
I wonder if any of those thirty percent were ever spent on supporting “the intellectual structure of the Internet”. It appears that, despite lofty goals, the money was meant to go to the National Science Foundation and was eventually ruled an illegal tax.
The fee wasn’t very popular. Of course, charging for something that used to be free is never going to be popular, but critics also found the fee, even if they accepted its existence, to be excessive in relation to the services provided. From the Suck article:
Call us stupid, but we expected the fees to have some relation to the actual cost of registering domains and running a dozen or so root servers.
So, it’s 1995, and one company is running the IP/DNS show as a monopoly, and making money off it to boot. Network Solutions is simply too powerful. They start censoring domain names, which they absurdly argue is a right they have under the First Amendment of the US Constitution, you know, the one about free speech. Pressure’s mounting, and in 1998, the contract is dissolved and Network Solutions’s responsibilities are handed over to the newly created nonprofit ICANN, which is the current tsar of the internet. The acronym cabal runs thus: ICANN controls IANA, which runs InterNIC, which used to be DDN-NIC, which is the thing that controls DNS/IP space. I think. I’m a little unclear about the differences and responsibilities of IANA, DDN-NIC and InterNIC, but the point is that ICANN ultimately runs all this stuff.
Ok, history lesson’s over. The problem here is that the world standardized on a platform ultimately controlled by the United States government, and this government has in turn handed the management over to a series of more or less undemocratic entities. What’s wrong with this is that the internet doesn’t belong to anyone. It belongs to no nation but all, and it should, I think, be run by no one but everyone. If there was ever a case for international cooperation, it’s got to be here, when we’re dealing with the fundamentals of internet infrastructure. It isn’t technologically impossible to establish alternatives to the ruling hegemony, but in practice it is. The world runs on one system, and can’t easily just switch over, at least not unprompted. It’s not going to happen organically, in a grassroots sort of way. If the situation is to change, it needs to change centrally, for all the internet’s decentralized glory.
Wikipedia mentions that among the alternatives to ICANN that have been suggested (likely by whoever edited that wiki page, since the alternatives are [citation needed]) is creating a new UN agency to perform the functions ICANN does today. Ideologically, this sounds great. The building blocks of the internet is just the sort of thing that should be controlled internationally, by worldwide consensus instead of by one particular government or whatever agency that government decides to subcontract to. At the very least, maybe that could help untangle the mess of acronyms and bureaucracy that makes understanding who is really in charge of what such a pain. In practice, though, UN agencies tend to be ruled more by political agendas and power blocs than by international democracy or worldwide consensus. Maybe it’s not such a good idea. Maybe creating “a new non-profit organization without any links to the current interested parties” is a better alternative.
I’m not a libertarian, but when it comes to the internet, I’m very much a believer in keeping it as free and open as possible. I think top-level domains should be created liberally and I think the market should decide which ones stay and which ones don’t. I think awarding top-level DNS servers and IP addresses should be done freely and the only centralized control should be technological; if there is to be any centralized control, it shouldn’t be political, it should deal with things like the IPv4 to IPv6 transition, not things like censoring domain names or deciding that .xxx is not an appropriate top-level domain. And all ties to specific nations should be severed: this means you, USA.
Imagine a hollow planet. It has a very limited usable surface area, but has huge spaces underground. Anyone can build as much as they want underground, but to connect with others who aren’t part of your underground complex, you need to build on the surface, which has very few usable plots of land. Imagine if one central entity controlled both the allocation of surface land and the maps that told you how to get from one plot of land to another. Wouldn’t you want the central entity to be as democratic and free of attachment to any particular nation, ideology, interest group, corporation, or ethnic group as possible? Surface area represents IP addresses and maps represent domains.
In principle, ICANN and the United States’s position with regards to it are very problematic. In practice, it’s a smaller problem, but it’s still a problem. The internet’s infrastructure should be as free, open and democratic as possible. Don’t you think?
