Add cyberspace to the fronts where the world’s thugs are on the march, and America is in retreat.
In Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is consolidating his ill-gotten gains. In the Sea of Japan, North Korea just test-fired no less than 25 short-range ballistic missiles while we were obsessing over the whereabouts of Flight MH370. In Syria, Bashar al-Assad has freedom-seeking rebels on the run.
And in Washington, the Obama administration this month removed a major obstacle to authoritarians’ bid for control of the Internet, as the Commerce Department announced it will terminate its contract with ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names, next year.
It sounds like a minor bureaucratic decision, but in fact it removes the one clear guarantee that the Internet stays free and open when countries like Russia, China and Iran are working to make sure no one receives or sends anything over the ’Net that they don’t approve of or control.
In the view of history, Obama’s surrenders on Syria and Ukraine will pale in comparison with his surrender of the Internet to its enemies.
Since ICANN was created as a nonprofit corporation in 1998, its job is providing every computer server or network a unique Information Protocol address, so that any user searching for a specific IP address will actually connect to that address and no other — and can do so from anywhere he or she enters that address in a Web browser.
In short, ICANN keeps the ’Net open but orderly, and the Commerce Department’s job since 1998 has been to oversee the process that’s committed to that open, orderly ’Net universe — the one we all know.
Now the Obama administration has decided that American oversight isn’t fair to the rest of the world. Instead, a Commerce spokesman said, “We look forward to ICANN convening stakeholders across the global community” to decide how the Internet should be run.
Problem is, that “global community” includes lots of powers that don’t want an open Web:
• Since 2003, China’s “Great Firewall” has been monitoring or blocking all forbidden foreign content on the ’Net or on social networks.
• In Russia, Putin’s System of Operative-Investigative Measures, a k a SORM, intercepts and rips out whatever data state police agencies want from e-mails, phone and mobile communications, social networks and all data storage.
• Other governments from Iran to Turkey to Venezuela crack down on the Web in various ways — a task that “global” control of ICANN will make far easier.
The frontman for this power grab is the UN’s International Telecommunication Union, which has already shown itself over the last decade to be largely a tool of Russia, China and other authoritarian regimes. It’s even on record supporting letting governments choke off access to the Internet in the name of “information security” — a euphemism for censorship.
Now the ITU won’t have to bother. How much better to control the Internet’s flow of information right at its source, by bullying ICANN to give governments more say in the assignment or non-assignment of domain names.
Then Putin could render a dissident Web site — or even one he dislikes that’s based overseas — nonexistent by stripping away its IP address. Even the Web’s traditional protections for anonymity could be at risk if tyrants force ICANN to abandon that principle for the sake of that same “information security.”
In the absence of the United States as umpire and bodyguard, the bureaucrats at ICANN will be under enormous pressure to yield to those who complain that the Internet is “biased” toward Western values like free speech and open trade (addresses .com and .net alone handle 80 billion queries a day and $200 billion in e-commerce every year), and too subservient to the United States — which has been the chief guardian of the Internet’s libertarian ethos.
Indeed, some in ICANN are already applauding Obama’s act of surrender, citing the Snowden leaks as somehow showing that Washington can’t be trusted to oversee cyberspace — even though the NSA program has nothing to do with the ’Net.
With Commerce’s craven decision already made, it’s up to Congress to halt this act of political cowardice before the September 2015 deadline — and to save the ’Net.
Because if Obama gives away the one thing that makes the Internet unique, its guarantee of freedom, it’ll be gone forever.
Arthur Herman is the author of “Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.”