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Critical Internet Resources – What are
they?
People, power, names, numbers and roots
November 12,
2007
By Janna Quitney Anderson, Director of Imagining
the Internet and Assistant Professor of Communications,
Elon University
 Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil - The Internet is absolutely kooky. A
bunch of smart people began tinkering with making this
tool for connection work – first a few of them,
and then thousands and thousands of them – linked
some computers together, just improving things
gradually together by trial and error.
The Internet began its life as a connection between a
couple of nodes – two computers communicating in
the most rudimentary way in the late 1960s. By 1973 the
entire network connected just 30 institutions. In less
than 40 years it grew and grew as more people all over
the world began to work together to achieve an Internet
connection. Now more than 1.2 billion people enjoy
regular access to the Internet, and the big question at
the 2007 Internet Governance Forum is: "How can we
find a way to connect the next billion people –
and how can we eventually connect everyone in the
world?"
Today's Internet is big business, it is
empowering, it has what seems to be an unlimited
potential for improvement in the future. We have high
expectations for it because we have come so incredibly
far in such a short time. Two of the men who were there
at the beginning, Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf, the
co-inventors of the Internet Protocol, were out-and-out
stars of a panel session at the Internet Governance
Forum Monday afternoon in Rio.
 The panel was all about
Critical Internet Resources. What falls under CIR?
According to Cerf, it is more than the architecture
that provides Internet service and the many
organizations that work together as independent,
international units to run it.
"ICANN is a multistakeholder structure which was
born that way," he said in his opening remarks.
"It has evolved increasing mechanisms for
involving interested stakeholders in policymaking in
regard to the domain-naming system and Internet address
assignment.
"It has created regional At-Large organizations
in order to inform discussion on public policy coming
from civil society. Almost any resource that is
important to the Internet becomes critical at one time
or another. For example, having electric power
available. Having a technical workforce available to
help you build and operate pieces of Internet. Having a
highly open standards-making process is a critical
Internet resource."
He continued: "I hope we don't lose track of
the breadth of resources that are needed to
successfully implement and operate this global
Internet."
Cerf's statement was a proactive response to his
accurate expectation that instead of discussing ALL
critical Internet resources, people in the room at IGF
would focus on scrutinizing and second-guessing the
activities and composition of ICANN, the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
Controversy over the Internet domain-naming system and
the positioning and control of root servers generally
consumes most of the public discussion of CIR to the
disappointment of people who would like to address
additional topics of importance. But those discussions
and the natural evolution of the Internet have spurred
many positive changes at ICANN over the past year, and
ICANN officials assured everyone at the forum that
change will continue, as governments are removed as
much as possible from its processes. The best way to
find out more about ICANN's new initiatives is
to visit the ICANN site and read updates from ICANN
bloggers for more information.
The IGF CIR panel included many illustrious
participants, all of whom made excellent contributions,
but the audience hung on the words of Cerf and Kahn,
the Internet pioneers who have won worldwide acclaim
and respect for their inventiveness and their continued
dedication to making a difference in assuring that the
future of their IP invention would be one to benefit
the public good.
Many topics of interest came up… It was
proposed that convergence and accelerating change will
bring a day when ICANN and ITU might merge, or perhaps
completely disappear and be replaced by a completely
new governance organization, and a variety of
panelists, from Milton Mueller of Syracuse University
to Cerf himself agreed to this possibility. Mueller
also proposed that "within two years" ICANN
could be "denationalized," adding, "We
would like to remove the Internet from geopolitical
contention as much as possible."
 But the attention remained
on Kahn and Cerf. While Cerf was main a panelist and
received the bulk of audience questions, fielding them
pleasantly and with a great amount of charm, Kahn
played a smaller but equally important role as a
discussant.
"I think it's really important to see this in
a setting of time," Kahn said. "The Internet
has really had a complex evolution over the past
30-some years. Vint and I pretty much had free rein to
go ahead and try what we wanted. What we did was spend
quite a bit of our time over the past 20 years
systematically working to get government out of the
business of running the Internet. There is very little
left that has any direct government tie –
it's mainly the private sector that is running the
Internet today."
Kahn said there is too much focus on ICANN. He said we
should be paying more attention to what's
"going on in our computers," referring to the
fact that companies that build the hardware and
software build in certain elements and
capabilities that we often aren't aware of, and
that is problematic, and our Internet connections allow
people to surreptitiously place software and malware on
them.
Kahn also defended the quality and future potential of
the Internet he and Cerf helped build.
"There's been quite a bit of work on
developing something called the 'clean slate'
Internet," he said. "If anything, it's
been working too well if we're getting all this
spam and viruses. We don't need a brand new one, we
just need to figure out how to deal with those
problems. That doesn't mean we won't need new
architecture in the future, but there are various ways
that can be explored."
He endorsed the evolution of ICANN, saying, "I
hope ICANN continues to flourish going forward, because
it's one of many options, not the only one."
The Critical Internet Resources discussion was
interesting. It was a civilized discussion about
important issues, but it didn't cover as much
ground as it might have. One more extremely important
observation of the CIR session that should be
mentioned: At the head table of 12 panelists and
discussants, there was just one woman and just one
non-caucasian person. Something has to be done about
inclusion.
Kahn and Cerf are a great one-two punch. It's easy
to see how their combination of intelligence and
humanity has helped the Internet continue to be a force
for global good. Their spirit is contagious, and they
are to be congratulated for their tireless work to
continue to channel this creation of connection in a
positive direction.
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