The infrastructure and standardisation basket
Technology, standards, and politics The debate over network protocols illustrates how standards can be politics by other means. Whereas other government intervention into business and technology (such as safety regulations and anti-trust actions) are readily seen as having political and social significance, technical standards are generally assumed to be socially neutral and therefore of little historical interest. But technical decisions can have far-reaching economic and social consequences, altering the balance of power between competing businesses or nations and constraining the freedom of users. Efforts to create formal standards bring system builders’ private technical decisions into the public realm; in this way, standards battles can bring to light unspoken assumptions and conflicts of interest. The very passion with which stakeholders contest standards decisions should alert us to the deeper meaning beneath the nuts and bolts.9
The Domain Name System (DNS) The current situation DNS handles Internet addresses (such as www.google.com) and converts them to IP numbers (a simplified scheme of this process is presented in in the graphic over the page). DNS consists of root servers, top-level domain (TLD) servers, and a large number of DNS servers located around the world. The management of DNS has been a hot issue in the Internet governance debate. One of the main controversies involves the ultimate authority of the US government (via the Department of Commerce) over root servers, the top tier of the hierarchically organised DNS. It is further aggravated by the fact that 10 out of 13 existing root servers are located in the United States (with three more in Europe and Asia). To address this problem and to enhance the scalability of the root server system, the ‘Anycast’ scheme was developed, which now includes about a hundred servers all over the world and in all continents. DNS includes three types of top-level domains: generic (gTLD), country code (ccTLD), and sponsored (sTLD). gTLDs include domains that could be obtained by anyone (.com, .info, .net and .org). sTLDs are limited to specific group. For example, the sTLD ‘.aero’ is open for registration only for airtransport industry. ccTLDs are limited to specific country (.uk, .cn, .in). For each gTLD there is one registry that maintains an address list. For example, the .com gTLD is managed by VeriSign. The ‘salesman’ function is performed by registrars. ICANN provides overall coordination of DNS by 41