[governance] What.the China experience can teach the astute watchers about the internet...

[Karl E. Peters]

     It seems that discussion of China as it relates to the internet is
rather in fashion these days, yet nothing is really new. China did not
set up its own DNS to get at ICANN (Though it did serve to bring out the
obvious in terms of ICANN's gradual marginalization.), but rather to
help retain the power for the current leadership by limiting the amount
of dissent or contradicting stories its people could access and feed
questions and further dissent.
     I wrote the daily English newscast for Shanghai TV during the
Tian-an-Men massacre in 1989. Not only did we not cover the story at
all, but it was my job to explain to all the foreign press there, still
packing gear to leave from the just completed summit between Gorbachev
and Deng, why they could use our facilities to send out favorable news
of the summit, but could not also use our access to send out news of the
protests and massacre a few days later. Unlike the USSR, who sought
political reform before economic reform, the Chinese Communists wisely
went for economic reform first, took credit for the incredible upturn in
the economy and further cemented their power.
    In short, China's own DNS is to exert the power of information
control on its own people, not to make a point with regard to ICANN or
Google. No amount of money or pressure will get China to give up the
control of information to its people willingly. If Google want to work
thee, they MUST work to Chinese standards. Information control is
critical there. When I first shared my Christian faith with my
mother-in-law there in 1988, she had been led to believe Christianity
was an anti-government political party and had no concept of it as a
system of faith. She now attends church three hours a day, seven days a
week. With no countering information, though, she had only one answer to
give for that group and was easily steered away from the truth she never
heard about. More information, when made available, changed her life.
China is deathly afraid of people seeing too much from outside of their
carefully scripted "reality".
     All this said, however, the point that the internet world is
changing is still valid. It frankly does not matter WHY 300 million
people now see a different selection of Top-Level Domains on a system
completely unreliant on ICANN or the US DOC. The simple fact is that
they do, and many more will follow in many other parts of the world. It
does not HAVE TO cause collisions in the name-space, however. There is a
way to prevent it through cooperation, not control. ICANN will never
again "control" what is seen by hundreds of millions of internet users.
They will control less and less every year. Soon, without tremendous
streamlining and cutting of costly bureaucratic regulation and extensive
milking of their historical position granted by the DOC through the JPA,
ICANN will more quickly be recognized as just another option for getting
a TLD live in the "Inclusive Name-Space" in which all the other root
systems work for market share, or in the case of China, just take some.
Why should anyone suffer like Chris Ambler did with his costly bid for
.WEB some years ago when there will be so many other ways to get their
products and services reliably to hundreds of millions of customers?
     To reform ICANN sufficiently to complete with ANY kind of
competitive DNS providers would completely change the nature and
operation of ICANN. I personally believe that it can not be done and
that it will go the way of the dinosaur that could not adapt.
     I encourage those of you here to think outside the box and begin to
figure out how the internet can survive and flourish in the new
multi-DNS world. "Internationalizing" ICANN will not bring China back
into the fold and it will do little to change the minds of others now
considering their own DNS for whatever reasons. The old internet world
is never coming back, and that is all ICANN is prepared for. Even a
really nice tube TV will not sell very well in the age of flat screens!

Karl E. Peters
620 Sea Island Road, #123
St. Simons Island, GA 31522  USA

Tel.: (912) 638-1638

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep in order to gain what he
cannot lose."  -Jim Elliot


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