[governance] People's Daily of China: US must hand over Internet control to the world

[Rebecca MacKinnon]

A shot across the bow from China's government mouthpiece...

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90777/7915248.html
 (People's Daily Online <http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/>
) 11:10, August 18, 2012
<http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90777/7915248.html#>
  <http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90777/7915248.html#>

The Internet has become one of the most important resources in the
world in just a fewdecades, but the governance mechanism for such an
important international resourceis still dominated by a private sector
organization and a single country.

The U.S. government said in a statement on July 1,
2005 that its CommerceDepartment would continue to support the work of
Internet Corporation for AssignedNames and Numbers (ICANN), and
indefinitely retain oversight of the Internet’s 13 rootservers.

This indicated the U.S. decision to retain ultimate control over the
global Internet,which enabled it to unilaterally close the Internet of
another country. A suddenlyparalyzed Internet would definitely cause
huge social and economic losses to thecountry.

More and more countries are beginning to question the U.S. control
over the world’s
Internet as the international resource should be managed and supervised by all
countries together. However, the United States has conducted a
pre-emptive strike,and refused to give up control over the Internet in
the name of protecting the resource.The refusal reflects its hegemonic
mentality and double standards.

The United States controls and owns all cyberspaces in the world, and
other countries
can only lease Internet addresses and domain names from the United
States, leadingto the U.S. hegemonic monopoly over the world’s
Internet.

During the Iraq War, the U.S. government in 2003 asked ICANN to
terminate services
relating to Iraq’s top-level domain name “.iq” and then all websites
with the domainname “.iq” disappeared overnight. The United States has
taken advantage of its
control over the Internet to launch an invisible war against
disobedient countries and to
intimidate and threaten other countries.

The United States have repeatedly called for “protecting Internet
freedom.”In fact, it is
 only protecting its own “Internet freedom” even at the expense of
other countries. Ten
of the global Internet’s 13 root servers are located in the United
States, and the U.S.government can supervise the Internet for national
security reasons according to the
U.S. law. By doing so, the United States actually gains access to all
information
transmitted online, while other countries can do nothing about it.

Ultimate control over the Internet has been an important tool for the
United States to
promote its power politics and hegemony worldwide, and any other
country may fallvictim to this. As a big country on the Internet,
China opposes the U.S. unreasonable
and unilateral management of the Internet, and seeks to work with the
international
community to build a new international Internet governance system.

-- 
Rebecca MacKinnon
Author, Consent of the Networked <http://consentofthenetworked.com/>
Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation<http://newamerica.net/user/303>
Co-founder, Global Voices <http://globalvoicesonline.org/>
Twitter: @rmack <http://twitter.com/rmack>
Office: +1-202-596-3343
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