Who Owns the Internet?

Google is fighting China, but (almost) all the connections come together in the U.S.

American superpower Google has called out another world superpower, the People’s Republic of China, challenging China’s Internet regulatory agencies to engage in a moral-media battle. Google says if China continues censoring and data mining on Google’s search engine, it will close its China operation. Google’s electronic market share in China’s gigantic growth is admittedly only about 30 percent, minuscule compared to the party line-faithful Baidu search engine. Google China’s news feeds originate from China’s state agency, so its relevance is somewhat akin to the old Pravda days. That was the deal Google made with Beijing’s leadership.

Hillary Clinton’s symbolic threat of an Internet provider’s conference at the U.S. State Department came first. She spoke of “serious charges” against China that had to be looked into. There is no question that Google used the freedom of the Internet to violate international copyright law on a global scale; the details of which are currently being investigated in U.S. courts. Nonetheless, Google has already apologized to the Chinese government for digitizing Chinese books en masse and posting their contents on the Internet.

But behind this unusual squabble between the “search engine and the Chinese Communist Party,” there’s a fundamental question to be answered: Who owns the Internet, anyway?

Ten years ago, who would have asked, “Who owns the world’s air?” Today, we know at least one thing: the atmosphere is being polluted and it’s a resource valuable enough to be protected for the entire world. It belongs to no one country alone but rather to every living thing on the planet. We also realize that the Internet is the oxygen of global trade and by virtue of its technical principles still belongs mainly to its developers, the Americans. As long as the wired Internet is dependent upon 13 closely guarded root servers, it is politically controllable just as any other communications hub. These servers are operated by the Pentagon and NASA as well as by private, mainly American corporations. Seven of them are located inside U.S. borders with the remaining six distributed around the world.

Every nation owes the registration of its domain name (such as “de” for Germany and “cn” for China) to a California information technology professor named Jon Postel, an aging hippie who wore his hair in a ponytail. The Pentagon allowed him to govern as he saw fit until 1998 when he suffered a heart attack that some said was brought on by his fall from power. Since then, a private international organization called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has been responsible for assignment and technical administration of international domains. It is governed, however, by U.S. law. In other words, this apparently international concept called the Internet is subject to a sort of Monroe Doctrine. Washington would no more permit outsiders tinkering with its basic structures than it would consider allowing the deployment of nuclear missiles to Cuba.

Proposed legislation has been floating around the U.S. Congress for several months that would, if enacted, give Barack Obama the right to respond with a “national response” to any serious threat of hackers from cyberspace. It doesn’t require much imagination to visualize that such threats wouldn’t necessarily have to be of a military or terrorist nature.

In the fall of 2008, when the world of international finance threatened, in one weekend, to melt like a snowball in summer, it would have been theoretically possible to close all banks, markets and credit card servers via the Internet. Global commerce would have been temporarily suspended.

The technology to blockade the Internet globally already exists because the most important Internet access points are there where they were developed. Needless to say, such action would have the impact of a gigantic meteor. The world — and America along with it — would fall silent with the exception of a few remote Internet islands. Because of that, a certain logic exists in the Internet world today similar to the days of nuclear deterrence: whoever first turns off the oxygen called the Internet will be the second one to suffocate. But first, there would have to be a Hollywood version.