FOCUS on Internet governance

In Chapter 4 we will look briefly at how governments promote and control, through laws, the use of the Internet in their jurisdiction. In this section, we look at the growth of the Internet as a global phenomenon and how the standards described in the previous section were devised. The Internet is quite different from all previous communication media since it is much less easy for governments to control and shape its development. Think of print, TV, phone and radio and you can see that governments can exercise a fair degree of control on what they find acceptable. With the Internet, governments can have a say, but their control is diminished.

Esther Dyson (1998) has been influential in advising on the impact of the Internet on society; she describes Internet governance as the control put in place to manage the growth of the Internet and its usage. Governance is traditionally undertaken by government, but the global nature of the Internet makes it less practical for a government to control cyberspace. Dyson says:

Now, with the advent of the Net, we are privatizing government in a new way – not only in the traditional sense of selling things off to the private sector, but by allowing organizations independent of traditional governments to take on certain ‘government’ regulatory roles. These new international regulatory agencies will perform former government functions in counterpoint to increasingly global large companies and also to individuals and smaller private organizations who can operate globally over the Net.

Dyson (1998) describes different layers of jurisdiction. These are:

1. Physical space comprising individual countries in which their own laws such as those governing taxation, privacy and trading and advertising standards hold.
2. ISPs – the connection between the physical and virtual worlds.

There are a number of established non-profit-making organizations that control different aspects of the Internet. These are sometimes called ‘supra-governmental’ organizations since their control is above government level. We will explore each of these in turn.

1. The net neutrality principle

Net or network neutrality is a principle that many advocate based on the organic way in which the Internet grew during the 1980s and 1990s. The principle enshrines equal access to the Internet and the web which is threatened by two different forces. First and the most common context for net neutrality is the desire by some telecommunications companies and ISPs to offer tiered access to particular Internet services. The wish of the ISPs is to potentially offer different quality of service, i.e. speed, to consumers based on the fee paid by the upstream content provider. So potentially ISPs could charge companies such as TV channels more because they stream content such as video content which has high band­width requirements.

Concerns over tiered access to services appear strongest in the United States where two proposed Bills to help achieve neutrality, the 2006 Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act and 2006 Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act did not become law. The ISPs were strong lobbyists against these bills and subsequently it has been alleged that provider Comcast has discriminated against users accessing peer-to-peer traffic from BitTorrent (Ars Technica, 2007). In European countries such as the UK, ISPs offer dif­ferent levels of access at different bandwidths.

The second and less widely applied, but equally concerning, concept of net neutrality is the wish by some governments or other bodies to block access to certain services or content. For example, the government in China limits access to certain types of content in what has been glibly called ‘The Great Firewall of China’, see for example (Wired, 2007) which describes the development of the Golden Shield which is intended to monitor, filter and block sensitive online content. More recently Google has been criticized for censoring its search results in China for certain terms such as ‘Tiananmen Square’.

2. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN, www.icann.org)

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the non-profit body formed for domain name and IP address allocation and management. It is perhaps the most public of the Internet control organizations since domain names or web addresses are one of the most tangible aspects of the Internet for users. These were previously controlled through US government contract by IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) and other entities.

According to the ICANN Fact Sheet (www.icann.org/general/fact-sheet.htm):

In the past, many of the essential technical coordination functions of the Internet were handled on an ad hoc basis by US government contractors and grantees, and a wide network of volunteers. This informal structure represented the spirit and culture of the research community in which the Internet was developed. However, the growing inter­national and commercial importance of the Internet has necessitated the creation of a technical management and policy development body that is more formalized in structure, more transparent, more accountable, and more fully reflective of the diversity of the world’s Internet communities.

The independence of such bodies raises several questions, such as who funds them and who they answer to – are they regulated? Incredibly, in 2002 ICANN had just 14 staff and a 19- member volunteer board of directors with Dr Vinton Cerf, who many consider as ‘father of the Internet’ as its chairman. Funding is through the fees charged for domain registration by commercial companies that register these domains. The policy statements on the sites sug­gest that ICANN policy is influenced by various stakeholders, but the main control is an independent review body of ten academics, lawyers from countries as diverse as New Zealand, Argentina, Peru, Denmark, Japan and, of course, the USA.

3. The Internet Society (www.isoc.org)

The Internet Society (ISOC) is a professional membership society formed in 1992. It sum­marizes its aims as

To provide leadership in addressing issues that confront the future of the Internet, and is the organization home for the groups responsible for Internet infrastructure standards, including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB).

A key aspect of the society’s mission statement (www.isoc.org/isoc/mission) is:

To assure the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of people throughout the world.

Detailed points of the aims of its mission are that it:

1. Facilitates open development of standards, protocols, administration and the technical infrastructure of the Internet
2. Supports education in developing countries specifically, and wherever the need exists
3. Promotes professional development and opportunities for association to Internet leadership
4. Provides reliable information about the Internet
5. Provides forums for discussion of issues that affect Internet evolution, development and use – technical, commercial, societal, etc.
6. Fosters an environment for international cooperation, community, and a culture that enables self-governance to work
7. Serves as a focal point for cooperative efforts to promote the Internet as a positive tool to benefit all people throughout the world
8. Provides management and coordination for on-strategy initiatives and outreach efforts – humanitarian, educational, societal, etc.

It can be seen that although it focuses on technical issues of standards and protocols, it is also conscious of how these will affect global society.

4. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF, www.ietf.org)

This is one of the main technical bodies. It is an international community of network designers, operators, vendors and researchers concerned with the development of the Inter­net’s architecture and its transport protocols such as IP. Significant subgroups are the Internet Architecture Board, a technical advisory group of ISOC with a wide range of responsibilities, and the Internet Engineering Steering Group, which is responsible for over­seeing the activities of the IETF and the Internet standards process.

An interesting feature of the IETF, in common with the other organizations, is that it operates using electronic communications as much as possible, without recourse to meet­ings. The IETF has just three main meetings per year. New technical specifications are largely agreed through e-mail and discussion forums.

5. The World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3.org)

This organization is responsible for web standards. Its director is Tim Berners-Lee who effectively invented the World Wide Web in the late 1990s while working at CERN, the Euro­pean Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva. He wrote the first WWW client (browser) and the first WWW server along with most of the communications software, defining URLs, HTTP and HTML. Today, it focuses on improving publishing standards such as HTML and XML. XML is an important development in forming what the WWW organization refers to as the ‘semantic web’ – see www.w3.org/ Consortium/Points for details. The consortium also aims to promote accessibility to the web for those with disabilities – for instance, it is work­ing on a voice-based browser. It is another relatively small organization, with fewer than 100 full-time staff in different countries.

6. Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture Consortium TINA-C (www.tina.com)

This consortium is somewhat different from the others in that it takes a higher-level view of how applications communicate over communications networks. It does not define detailed standards. Its principles are based on an object-oriented approach to enable easier integra­tion of systems. In its terms:

The purpose of these principles is to insure interoperability, portability and reusability of software components and independence from specific technologies, and to share the burden of creating and managing a complex system among different business stake­holders, such as consumers, service providers, and connectivity providers.

Although it has been established since the 1990s, it has had limited success in establishing solutions which are branded as ‘TINA-compliant’.

7. How can companies influence or take control of Internet standards?

As well as the supra-governmental organizations which we have reviewed above, it can be argued that companies seek control of the Internet to gain competitive advantage. For example, Microsoft used what have been judged as anti-competitive tactics to gain a large market share for its browser, Internet Explorer. In a five-year period, it achieved over 75% market share, which has given it advantages in other areas of e-commerce such as advertising revenue through its portal MSN (www.msn.com) and retail, through its sites such as travel site Expedia (www.expedia.com). Microsoft has also sought to control standards such as HTML and has introduced rival standards or variants of other standards (for example, VBScript rather than JavaScript and C# rather than Java). The control exerted by Microsoft is criticized by many and has been found to be anti-competitive in law (see http://news.bbc.co.Uk/1/hi/business/ 700084.stm for a summary of the judgment).

The existence of global Internet standards bodies such as those described above arguably means that it is less likely that one company can develop proprietary standards, although Microsoft has been successfully using this approach for many years. Today, companies such as Microsoft have to lobby independent organizations such as the World Wide Web Consor­tium to have their input into standards such as XML. Businesses can protect their interests in the Internet by lobbying these organizations or governments, or subscribing as members and having employees involved with development of standards. Even SMEs can be involved. Exchequer software, referred to in the XML section above, which has 75 employees, has been able to obtain competitive advantage through being closely involved with the development of XML standards for accounting software.

Many remain worried about the future control of the Internet by companies; the ‘World of Ends’ campaign (www.worldofends.com) illustrates some of the problems where control can limit consumer choice and stifle innovation. But the future of the Internet is assured because the three core principles espoused in the World of Ends document remain true:

• No one owns it.
• Everyone can use it.
• Anyone can improve it.

8. Open-source software

The selection of open-source software to support e-business applications is a significant decision for anyone managing technology infrastructure for a company. Open-source soft­ware is now significant in many categories relevant to e-business including operating systems, browsers, web servers, office applications and content management systems (including blogs).

The Open Source organization (www.opensource.org) explains its benefits as follows:

The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redis­tribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.

We in the open source community have learned that this rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few program­mers can see the source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits.

Table 3.4 summarizes some of the main advantages and disadvantages of open-source soft­ware. To gain an appreciation of the issues faced by a technical manager pondering the open-source dilemma, complete Activity 3.4.

This activity looks at a common issue facing technical managers: should they adopt standard software promoted by the largest companies or open-source software or cheaper software from other vendors?

Source: Dave Chaffey (2010), E-Business and E-Commerce Management: Strategy, Implementation and Practice, Prentice Hall (4th Edition).