Splitting the Web

8220;Sadly, it looks like the period in which the Internet functions seamlessly is over,8221; says Vint Cerf, one of the Internet8217;s better-known creators, now 8220;chief Internet evangelist8221; for Google.

The Balkanisation of the Net has been a long time coming. Its roots lie in the system8217;s unusual beginnings as an all-American, public-private hybrid. The Internet started as a US Defense Department communications grid designed to survive a nuclear war. Later, in the mid-1990s, when it became clear that this system had important commercial applications, a group of techie academics organised a kind of governing body to oversee its growth. Even then, there were battles over how much control the government should maintain, and how much should be distributed in a more decentralised way in the private sector. All this was largely done under the public radar, and almost entirely within the United States.

8220;Foreign governments by and large hadn8217;t understood the technology, and hadn8217;t paid much attention to the Net until it was pretty far along,8221; notes Milton Mueller, computer-science professor at Syracuse University. 8220;Once they woke up and realised that the US was in complete control, commercially and policywise, they became alarmed.8221;

Telecoms had always been under national control, and an international body, the International Telecommunications Union, coordinated things on the global level. But on the Web, American companies like IBM were helping make policy, US start-ups were getting rich charging fees for domain names, and the US Commerce Department had the final say on how things were run. It outsourced administration to a California company called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, which Cerf now chairs. 8220;That8217;s when the real power struggles began,8221; says Mueller.

Most of the world, especially the developing world, is angry that the United States still holds so much sway over the planet8217;s most crucial technological resource. Fanning the rage, ICANN, which has the sole power to approve top-level domain names, like .com, .net and so on, has been slow to create local language domains, making it tougher for people who speak languages not based on Roman characters to use the Net.

This issue was front and center at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis last year. 8220;A private California company simply shouldn8217;t be running this system that we all depend on,8221; says Jose Marcos Viana, one of the Brazilian delegates at the meeting.

Brazil, which operates the vast majority of its tax-collection system online, has reason to be concerned about the possibility of politically motivated cyber-snooping by the United States.

There were protests over ICANN8217;s recent proposals to create an .xxx domain name for pornographic content, which many countries found offensive. Some, like Iran and the Arab nations, were concerned that Washington might decide at some point to turn off their national domain names for political reasons, cutting them off the Web entirely.

Ambassador David Gross, the State Department official who led the US delegation, says there is no basis for such fears. 8220;While it8217;s not even clear that we could turn a country 8216;off8217; the Net, we have no incentive to do it,8221; he says. 8220;It would destroy the stability and reliability of the system.8221;

That hasn8217;t stopped Iran from threatening to create their own alternative version of the Internet, similar to those already run by anti-American tech activists in Europe.It8217;s easy to do: you simply copy the information on the 13 key servers around the world that form the root of all Web traffic. One German group, the Open Root Server Network, has already done so, in protest over US actions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It8217;s completely possible that aggrieved governments, say, could set up new versions of ibm.com or whitehouse.gov. Once that happens, Internet traffic could be misrouted, and people could end up on false or misleading Web sites without even realizing it. What8217;s more, the ambiguity could slow servers or stall great swaths of the Net. And the real worry is that entire nations will go their own way, which could cause the whole system to collapse.

China, too, is fed up with ICANN8217;s delay on local language domains, and has already created a few of its own. More important, China8217;s efforts to police its Netizens are, in effect, creating a parallel Web. Google, eager to grab market share from the local Chinese search engine baidu.com, has come under particular fire for tweaking its system so that users in China who search, say, 8220;Falun Gong8221; will get only state-approved, anti-Falun Gong Web sites.

China has exported such censorship techniques to many other countries; taken to its logical extreme, this is another way of undercutting the global unity of the system. Such efforts undermine not only personal freedom but economic benefits as well. Once the Internet stops at national borders, e-commerce starts looking a lot more like old-fashioned retail.

Western countries like France and Germany fear digital giants like Google for another reason:their role as cultural gatekeepers. The two nations recently agreed to pour several billion euros8217; worth of taxpayer money into creating a new slate of state-funded digital champions, including a 8220;Euro-Google8221; called Quaero, which would supposedly be more linguistically inclusive than its better-known competitor. The result could isolate consumers rather than connect them, in the same way that France8217;s ill-fated Minitel system delayed that country8217;s forays onto the Web.

Telecoms in both the United States and Europe are now investing tens of billions of dollars in faster broadband pipes that will be able to deliver content in real time. These are not cheap. The telecoms say that content providers like Google, eBay, Yahoo and others should share some of that load, and want to start charging these companies higher rates to guarantee reliable delivery of their new video-rich content. But the tech companies and many digital-rights NGOs say that overturning 8220;Net neutrality8221; will create a two-tier Internet and users will have to watch whatever the richest companies decide to air, rather like going back to the pre-cable era of network television.

Developing countries are asking developed ones to help them maintain and upgrade their telecommunications networks as a form of aid. Tarek Kanel, the Egyptian minister of Communications, wants the United States and the EU to help pay the 10 million to 15 million per year that it costs his country to maintain the Internet backbone linking it to the rest of the world. While Western companies have been keen to build fiber-optic bridges into potentially rich markets like Asia, they have much less interest in doing so in the Mideast and Africa.

Even as the US House Energy and Commerce Committee defeated a proposal to maintain Net neutrality in late April, the EU has sent warning signals to telecoms that it won8217;t stand for any moves that create an unequal playing field for new digital players.

As countries push for more local-language domain names, tricky political questions are emerging. Who has rights to the Chinese-language version of .cn 8212; China or Taiwan? Who gets first dibs on names in Farsi characters 8212; the Iranians or the Afghans? Do Western companies that hold domain names in English get the international rights, or should those go to local people?

Figuring out the right balance between commerce, culture and connectivity won8217;t be an easy task. But there could be no better use for our global bandwidth right now. Newsweek