Internet regulation, country domains and ISOC

Harsha Wijayawardhana President ISOC Sri Lanka Chapter

Internet has penetrated almost every part of the world today and it has already begun to reshape how we live, communicate and how we are governed. Social web tools which are known as Web 2.0 tools such as Twitter and Facebook have made it possible to facilitate political uprisings which are spreading like wildfire in the Middle East.

Wikileaks, a phenomenon of Internet age, showed how vulnerable powerful governments such as the government of the United States are. Citizens world over debate whether there is anything called government secrets due to Wikileaks revelations.

Even veteran users of internet may be asking how internet is governed. What are the important organizations which keep Internet running? The answer is - several organizations which are loosely connected and one of the most important of these is the Internet Society popularly known as ISOC the Sri Lanka Chapter of which was launched on March 25, 2011.

Internet

Before presenting what Internet Society is, it is time to speak a little about Internet itself. Internet is made by interconnecting networks and these networks use mainly two protocols which are known as Transmission Control Protocol or popularly known as TCP and Internet Protocol or IP which are available free in the public domain. In other words, these are not propriety protocols with royalties.

What is a protocol one may ask? A Protocol is a standard something which is similar to grammar in a language. When we speak to each other, if the other person totally unknown to you can understand what each other says it is due to grammar.

Today many identify Internet as Web, though it is only a resource on the Internet. Email, File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and World Wide Web (www) are some of the common resources on the internet. Due to loosely coupled architecture of internet, no one controls internet or owns internet.

When a host connects to Internet through an Internet Service Provider by way of a fixed line, through mobile network or a dial-up, that host becomes part of the Internet.

As mentioned earlier, Internet is a network of networks and networks are made of hosts or computers or digital devices such as mobile phones; even some household items such as refrigerators have the ability to connect to Internet today.

All of these hosts are identified on the Internet with a particular address which is similar to a postal address though made up of ‘bits’ since digital devices think in binary numbers. The Internet is at crossroads due to the exhaustion of presently used addresses.

These addresses are known as IP version 4 or 32 bit addresses; due to its 32 bits, the maximum number of addresses one could have is limited to 4 billion (the number is less than the total population of the world) and by the time this article is written, the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) which is responsible for IP addresses and one of those loosely coupled organizations important for Internet, has run out of the 32 bit addresses.

IANA has issued a statement stating that the last of these address blocks has been released to the relevant regional organizations. The Internet will transit from 32 bit addresses to 128 bit addresses in toto.

These are known as IP version 6 though some of the hosts have already been allocated 128 bit addresses.

The world had been getting ready for this eventuality for many years and many tests had been carried out to find out whether major networks of the world were ready for this transition and it is expected that the Internet will cross over from the 32 bit address space to 128 bit address space without even a single user knowing this.

Internet Top Level Domain (TLD) and Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLD)

Since the Internet addresses are made of numbers, humans find it difficult to remember them. Humans think in words rather than in odd-looking numbers which are separated by dots.

Each of these numbers is translated and stored dynamically by servers which are known as Domain Name Service Servers or DNS servers. These servers are known also as look-up servers. Many of us speak of .com, .org, .mil, .net, .gov and they are known as generic Top Level Domains or gTLDs.

Although some of the gTLD remained fixed for some time after the initial introduction, a new set of gTLD has been added after 2000 and is popularly used: .aero, .biz, .museum, .asia etc.

.lk, .uk, .jp and .us are known as Country Code Top Level Domains or ccTLD. Sri Lanka obtained its domain in 1990 and it celebrated its 20th year in June 2010.

Sri Lanka achieved a major milestone in 2010 as the seventh country in the world to have its domain names in both its official languages (Sinhala and Tamil) and the first in the world to get approval for two languages at the TLD level.

Internet today has more non-English speaking or Non-Roman Script users than the ones who speak English.

Most of these users come from South East Asia - from countries like China, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. Having Internationalized the Domain Names Service (IDNS), Sri Lanka has shown that she can technically stand shoulder to shoulder with other technically advanced nations such as the USA, Germany and Japan.

ICANN and IANA

Several organisations are important for running the Internet and one of them is the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority popularly known as IANA. IANA was informally formed to take over the technical functions of ARPANET (the first packet Switching network in the world).

IANA controls or administers Root DNS servers for Internet and is the main body which assigns Protocols and numbers. Until the IPV4 exhaustion of this year, it was technically the repository for IPV4 IP address space though officially address spaces of IPV4 and IPV6 are under ICANN.

Joe Postel, an Internet Pioneer, who created the administration structure of Internet today, was the person who controlled Internet single handedly from the early 1970s until his untimely death in 1998 and the honour of creating IANA falls on him.

Joe Postel and Vint Cerf (who wrote TCP and IP protocols with Kahn) the pioneers of Internet suggested a catalogue of Socket numbers which resulted in the introduction of the now famous Request for Comments or RFCs in 1972.

Joe Postel was known as the ‘benevolent dictator’ of Internet during these early years of the Internet. During Postel’s era, IANA also was responsible for managing the TLD and ccTLDs . Though the first reference to IANA is only found in the RFC 1060 in 1990, it would have been in operation much longer.

It is noteworthy that Prof. Gihan Dias of the Moratuwa University who is also LK Domain Registrar obtained the Sri Lanka LK domain from Joe Postel in 1990.

Today IANA is managed by a younger organization which had come into existence after the death of Postel.

The organization is known as Internet Corporation for Names and Numbers or by its abbreviation, ICANN.

ICANN was created on September 18, 1998 and was incorporated on September 30, 1998 and is the legal body which has been contracted by the Department of Commerce of United States to administer Root servers, TLDs, IPV4 and IPV6 address spaces.

At present the administration of Root Servers is known as the ‘IANA Functions’ of ICANN.

Since Internet was a project of the Department of Defence of the United States, the US government directly controlled Internet until the creation of ICANN. Over the years ICANN has evolved and got released from the US Government control.

Last year (2010), the US Department of Commerce entered into an Affirmation of Commitments with ICANN, ensuring that ICANN is accountable to the broader internet community.

ICANN’s policy development approach is supported through a complex web of constituencies and ICANN’s relationship with governments across the world is managed through the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC).

Internet Society or ISOC

The Internet Society or ISOC was founded in 1992 by Internet Pioneers as an International Non-Profit Organisation.

It has more than one hundred organizational members and many thousands of individual members with over 85 local chapters worldwide.

It has regional bureaus in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America and South Asia and South East Asia. The vision of ISOC is given below:

“We see a future in which people everywhere can use the Internet to improve the quality of life:.... when standards, technologies, business practices and government policies sustain an open and universally accessible platform for innovation, creativity and economic opportunity.”

ISOC carries out many activities under three categories: standards, public policy and education. ISOC is the home for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) the main body for creating protocols and standards, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) and the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). In the policy category, ISOC works with the civil society, the private sector, and Governments. ISOC is prominently involved in the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in the Internet Governance area. ISOC has taken the lead of promoting and educating of IPV6. While ISOC had played a major role in training some of the Sri Lankan Internet Pioneers, currently it plays a major role in promoting and popularizing the internet throughout the world.

ISOC also promotes the use of local language content and domain names which are of primary importance to countries like Sri Lanka.

ISOC Sri Lanka Chapter

For some who had for many years dreamt of the ISOC (Sri Lanka Chapter), the launch of it on March 25 was a dream come true.

The Geneva based ISOC played a major role in training some of the Sri Lankan Internet pioneers during the period 1990-2001.

The Sri Lankan Internet pioneers trained by ISOC are Prof. Gihan Dias, (University of Moratuwa), Dr. Nimal Rathnayake (University of Peradeniya), Dr. Ruvan Weerasinghe (University of Colombo School of Computing- UCSC) and Jayantha Fernando (an IT Law specialist and presently Director and Legal Advisor ICTA and the first Sri Lankan to be elected Vice Chair of ICANN-GAC).

The UCSC founder director, late Prof. V. K. Samaranayake contributed greatly towards the creation of the ISOC Sri Lanka Chapter especially through the continued encouragement given in early 2000.

The Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA), the apex body for ICT in Sri Lanka, has contributed significantly to the development of the ICT sector and the Internet in Sri Lanka.

As the implementing organization of the flagship ICT development initiative known as the e-Sri Lanka Development Project, ICTA has made a significant contribution towards the development of ICT Sector, covering e-Government, ICT Private sector development, improving IT HR capacity in the Government and leading the Policy and Legal reforms efforts.

ICTA has also empowered the Sri Lankan rural communities to access the internet with the establishment of over 600 nenasala’s (Telecentres) and the creation of internet based content in Sinhala and Tamil. In addition to ICTA, the Telecom Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka (TRCSL) has also played a crucial role in the development of the internet in Sri Lanka.

In recent times TRCSL has taken the initiative to measure the broadband performance. TRCSL has also taken steps to increase the number of broadband coverage as well as to improve the performance of broadband connectivity across the country.

ICTA, together with TRCSL and the LK Domain Registry (LKNIC), has supported the creation of the ISOC (Sri Lanka Chapter).

The launch of ISOC will enable wider participation in standard creation and internet governance and promotion by the younger generation of Sri Lanka.

By their active participation in these efforts the country’s youths will also be able to make an indelible mark in the world of internet.