Past and Future of Internet

In December 2015, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation asked Apple to open a ‘backdoor’ to break into a phone recovered during the San Bernardino massacre. Apple refused, and is now fighting a battle to overturn a court order that went in favor of the FBI. In January 2016, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India banned the use of differential pricing by telecom companies, effectively putting an end to Facebook plan to roll out Free Basics, a scheme under which subscribers of a partner telecom companies would have free access to a subset of websites.

Both incidents appear to pitch the state versus a technology company. However, a brief history of the Internet will show, the implications to be drawn for the future of Internet governance are different in each case. In the 1990s, as the Internet grew in scope, the US government contracted the Domain Name System (DNS) registry, the task of ensuring unique identifiers for the different servers connected by the Internet, to Network Solutions Inc., creating a private monopoly of $1 Billion.

However, in 1992, the Internet society (ISOC) created a memorandum of understanding to assign governance functions, with representatives from businesses, intergovernmental organizations and ISOC itself. In 1988, the US department of commerce rejected the MoU process and recommended the DNS system be managed by a non-profit company, leading to the creation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The past 15 years have seen a remarkable growth of the Internet, with the number of websites increasing from 12 Million at the turn of the Millennium to over 1 Billion today.

However, traffic is heavily concentrated in websites belonging to a few corporations. The global slowdown and the decline of the BRICS have resulted in the coining of a new acronym of power – FANG, referring to Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google. Many Internet Companies are based in the US and place their servers there, thus giving the US government access to data from foreign countries while reducing the control of local governments over their information, and their ability to prosecute the managements of these companies.

So far, users have been willing to give away large amounts of information for the benefit of free services. However, the possibility that the government can gain access to their information may exercise a chilling effect on their usage and create an insurmountable obstacle for the future of the Internet Business Model. For the first time, as the Apple Episode shows, the US has specific interests which may be best served by allowing other states the freedom to pursue their own goals with respect to the Internet, thereby giving US itself similar powers, despite its diminished share of the Internet market.