Cracking the Internet on Many Levels
by Judith Dinowitz
October 6, 2005
On several levels, the Internet is experiencing what can only be described as ownership pains.
First, there's the story of
Cogent Communications vs.
Level 3. This is a tale of two corporations who can't seem to get along. This would be a private matter if these two companies weren't responsible for a chunk of the physical structure of the Internet. These are the people who own and manage some of the various physical structures that transfer data around the Net. Smaller companies make use of these physical structures to transfer data, and agreements exist on connections between each large network.
The disagreement between Cogent and Level 3 has caused the two companies to close off their peering points (the linkage points between the two networks). As a result, computers that connect through Cogent might have problems communicating with computers that connect through Level 3. For example, Penny Arcade is on a Cogent network and is unavailable to us because we're on a Level 3 network. Since this started, House of Fusion has noticed a slowdown, on average, of about 1,000 less users a day, bringing us down to about 6,500 unique users a day (using Google stats).
Cogent Communications has released a
statement about the disagreement, but there's still no sign of when these two companies will come to terms. Meanwhile, connectivity in parts of the Internet suffers because of a disagreement between two corporations.
Let's zoom out now, from the boardroom to the wider world of International politics. On this playing field, the integrity of the Internet is also threatened by a disagreement between countries. This fight is about control: Who gets to control the root servers of the Internet? These are the servers that contain the directory for the entire Internet -- the machines that run the top level DNS of every website out there.
For 11 days now, the US and the UN have been in a standoff. The US says that it will not give up control of the root servers of the Internet (something that they announced in June) and the European Union is pushing a proposal of a "new forum that would decide public policy, and a 'cooperation model' comprising governments that would be in overall charge." This proposal has been extremely popular in the UN, and the United States may be forced to give up control of the root servers. The UN has created committees with the express purpose of breaking the United States' control of these servers.
I see several possibilities here. One outcome is that the European Union and other countries within the UN will set up their own root servers, competitors to the ones controlled by the US. This would be tragic -- essentially, a breaking apart of the Internet into smaller, separate networks, a greater break than the disconnection between Cogent and Level3. We could end up with several "walled and gated" communities online instead of the free and open Internet we now enjoy. Perhaps these countries would charge non-citizens for access as well (hey, another way to make money off the Inter ... er ... Separated Net). Europeans who wished to enter the United States Network would have to give a user name and password and pay a fee for access. Similarly, Americans who wanted to access European or Asian resources might have to pay fees for the privilege. We would be much poorer, in both information and in our economies, if we were to allow the Internet to go that route.
A second possibility is that the European Union will force the United States to give up control of their servers, granting them access for "committee control." And committee control doesn't always work out. The UN would have to give the US something big to get them to give in here. I imagine we'd want some guarantee that control of these servers could not, in the long term, be used against us by our enemies. The loss of the equipment and the information it contains is another aspect of the negotiation. The root servers are like a blueprint of the online world, and access to that information is an edge in security.
The third possibility is that the UN will back down and let the status quo remain. That doesn't seem likely, given the way they're persuing this.
Whatever happens, these two public quarrels bring to the fore the shaky infrastructure of the Internet in terms of its connectivity and reliability. The question is whether these corporations and governments can work out their problems civilly, and keep the Internet a whole Internet and not a series of small networks, cut off from one another.
Internet Partitioning: Cogent vs. Level 3? (Slashdot, October 5, 2005)
Related Link: This mailing list archive notes a previous dispute between AOL and Cogent that affected Internet traffic:
Peering Dispute With AOL Slows Cogent Customer Access
EU, UN to Wrestle Internet Control from US (Slashdot, October 6, 2005)
Breaking America's Grip on the Net (Guardian, October 6, 2005)
