Our Man At Icann Keeps Internet Civil War At Bay
The Sunday Age
Sunday November 20, 2005
WHAT if the internet broke down? Imagine if one morning you turned on your computer and the whole thing just didn't work any more - what would happen to companies, stocks, indeed entire industries that have been created in the past decade (including my world of online journalism)?
More than a billion people use the internet daily, and it is this blur of cyber activity that is pumping the share price of companies such as Google (its price has quadrupled in 15 months) while making life awfully difficult for incumbents with high fixed costs, such as Telstra, which closed at a miserable $4.12 on Friday.If the World Wide Web collapsed, how would it affect local stocks, such as the online recruitment operator Seek (probably the most exciting new Australian company for a decade, up 14 per cent since June)? Or realestate.com (the property sales website whose stock is up 56 per cent since June and which has rejuvenated itself since rejecting a takeover bid from Rupert Murdoch)? Or eMitch (an online advertising company whose price has tripled since June)? The internet is unlikely to collapse in a technical sense. It was built by the United States military to withstand any form of challenge, including nuclear war. More likely, what could happen is that the people wishing to control the World Wide Web might have a falling out and a cyber civil war could destroy this wonderful communication system.A worst-case scenario is that it could Balkanise into loads of competing systems driven by various agencies with different agendas.Such a prospect briefly raised its head this week when the European Union and China tried to wrest control of the internet from the US-based non-profit body ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and hand it over to the United Nations. As it turned out, the idea was not accepted and, in an important meeting in Tunis, North Africa, ICANN managed to retain control of the World Wide Web.That's the story so far but, after the meeting, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan hinted strongly that the world body had every intention of coming back to the table on this one.If the internet is ever to fail - that is, to fail in its promise to deliver any information at any time to anybody - it will be because politics in forums such as ICANN and the UN turn sour.When stockbrokers and analysts talk about energy and resource stocks, there is endless discussions about sustainability; but, when it comes to the internet, few people seem to pay attention to the sustainability of the internet economy. Terry Cutler, a director of ideas incubator MindSharing, suggests: "The important thing for Australia is the internet is working very well and ICANN did very well to keep things just they way they are." Mr Cutler is a CSIRO director.I suppose it's hardly surprising that, if the market barely took notice of ICANN's victory, it is even more unlikely that people realised the man behind the victory was ICANN president Paul Twomey, an Australian who led the ill-fated National Office of the Information Economy (NOIE) in 2003.NOIE was scrapped by the Howard Government and Mr Twomey went on to more important things - like keeping the internet safe from civil war.James Kirby is editor of Eureka Report at eurekareport.com.au
© 2005 The Sunday Age