APRIL 2006 :: ONLINE

Alternate Internets?
Some Are Wary of U.S. Control Over Global Network

By Christopher Rhoads
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

More than a decade after the Internet became available for commercial use, other countries and organizations are building rivals to it-raising fears that global interconnectivity will be diminished.

German computer engineers are building an alternative to the Internet to make a political statement. A Dutch company has built one to make money. China has created three suffixes in Chinese characters substituting for .com and the like, resulting in Web sites and email addresses inaccessible to users outside China. The 22-nation Arab League has begun a similar system using Arabic suffixes.

"The Internet is no longer the kind of thing where only six guys in the world [know how to] build it," says Paul Vixie, 42 years old, a key architect of the U.S.-supported Internet who recently joined the German group's effort. "Now, you can write a couple of checks and get one of your own."

Alternatives to the Internet have been around since its beginning, but none gained much traction. Developing nations such as China didn't have the infrastructure or know-how to build their own networks and users generally didn't see any benefit from leaving the network that everyone else was on.

Now that is changing. As people come online in developing nations that don't use Roman letters-especially China with its 1.3 billion people-alternatives can build critical mass. Unease with the U.S. government's influence over a global resource, and in some cases antipathy toward the Bush administration, also lie behind the trend.

A Single Root

The Internet, developed by U.S. government agencies beginning in the 1960s, uses a so-called domain-name system, also called the "root," that consists of 264 suffixes. These include .com, .net, .org and country codes such as .jp for Japan. The root is coordinated by a private nonprofit group called Icann that works under the auspices of the U.S. Commerce Department.

Having a single root is central to the universality of the Internet and critical to its power and appeal. It helps ensure that when people type in a Web address such as www.amazon.com, they all end up at the site of the Internet retailer no matter where in the world they are or which Internet service provider they use. All addresses must use one of the 264 suffixes. Any changes must be approved by Icann and the Commerce Department.

But as the Internet's role grows around the world-more than half of the users today are outside the U.S.-some are uneasy with the notion that a U.S.-based body overseen by the U.S. government has sole power over what domain names are used and who controls each name. Other countries say Icann is too slow in forming domain names in non-Roman languages, slowing the development of an Internet culture in those countries. "The Internet has become a critical part of our lives," says Abdullah Al-Darrab, Saudi Arabia's deputy governor for technical affairs. "These policies should not be left to a single country or entity."

U.S. officials counter that the Internet is too valuable to tinker with or place under an international governing body. The risk is "the bureaucratization of the Internet and innovation," says Michael Gallagher, a Commerce Department official. Others argue that a fragmented Internet is a natural result of its global growth and isn't so harmful. Individual governments already can control what their citizens see online by blocking some sites.

One of the rival systems, the Open Root Server Network, was set up by Markus Grundmann, a security technician in Germany. Mr. Grundmann says he started ORSN in February 2002 because of his distrust of the Bush administration and its foreign policy. Mr. Grundmann fears that Washington could easily "turn off" the domain name of a country it wanted to attack, crippling the Internet communications of that country's military and government.

Mr. Vixie says he has no interest in making political statements but he agreed last September to work with Mr. Grundmann by operating one of ORSN's 13 mirrors, the servers that automatically copy any changes made to the main database of domain names. Mr. Vixie says he sees the European effort as a check of sorts on the Icann system to make sure it acts in the global interest.

For the moment, ORSN is merely a symbolic step. The domain names in ORSN's directory are identical to those in Icann's. Users of ORSN get routed in the same direction as they would if they were in the Icann system and can communicate with the same Web sites. But if ORSN disagrees with a move by Icann, it could refuse to follow suit.

Choose Your Suffix

A company called UnifiedRoot, based in Amsterdam, has taken things a step further than ORSN. In late November, the company began offering customers the right to register any suffix of their choosing, such as replacing .com with the name of their company. Users of UnifiedRoot can also access all sites using Icann-approved domain names such as .com, but Icann users can't go to a UnifiedRoot address, he says.

Some countries with non-Roman alphabets are also taking matters into their own hands. China has created three domain names in Chinese characters and made them available inside China only. Arab countries have experimented with domain names in Arabic, says Khaled Fattal, head of Minc.org, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the Internet multilingual.

"There is no such thing as a global Internet today," says Mr. Fattal. "You have only an English-language Internet that is deployed internationally. How is that empowering millions of Chinese or Arab citizens?"

Icann is responding to the criticism. At its last meeting in December, it took steps to enhance the role of foreign governments in its decision making and accelerated the development of non-English domain names.

Paul Twomey, CEO of Icann, says the divisions reflect cultural differences between nations that operate under a strong government hand and those, including the U.S., that put more trust in the private sector. "We are more comfortable with messy outcomes that work," says Mr. Twomey, who is Australian. "But we need to integrate other values and languages into the Internet and make sure that it still works as one Internet."