Opinion: We're just now beginning to see the effects of a global Internet on the world economy, and it looks good.The battle for the future of the Internet began in the small country of Tunisia last week. Two seemingly unrelated events—the fight over who controls domain name services for the rest of the world, and the announcement of the $100 laptop—may portend more about the future of the Net than just about anything else that's happening in technology these days.
The big fight over who controls the Domain Name System took place at the UN World Summit on the Information Society.
Currently, names are regulated by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for the Assignment of Names and Numbers), a quasi-government nonprofit corporation run by the U.S. Government and private industry to dole out domain names and take care of other administrative tasks that have to do with running the global Internet.
While ICANN can be seen as somewhat bureaucratic and opaque, it has competently negotiated the somewhat obscure and sometimes contentious realm of domain name assignments since it took over the job from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, a U.S. Government office.
Unfortunately, the fact that the United States is in charge of assigning domain names has rankled with some members of the world community, and a bloc of countries went to Tunis in order to try to wrest away control of the Internet.
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This group of countries (of which several members have been identified by Reporters Without Borders as most likely to censor their citizens' Internet access, including Saudi Arabia and Iran) wanted to move control of DNS to a world body, ostensibly under control of the UN.
The United States understandably resisted and a last-minute deal was inked that called for an Internet Governance Forum to be held in 2006 to further explore the issue.
While the main focus of the summit seemed to be the future of DNS, MIT luminary Nicholas Negroponte unveiled the first public prototype of a $100 laptop, a relatively low-powered device designed to bring computing power and Internet connectivity to the children of the world.
Featuring a swivel LCD screen, 500 MHz processor, 1GB of flash RAM storage, integrated Wi-Fi with mesh network support, and a hand crank that provides power, it ain't gonna set any speed or performance records. But it will provide the potential for millions to come online in the developing world.
The device is intended to be sold through governmental and NGO entities and not directly to the public (though there are rumors of a $200 commercial version). The idea is to get computing power and, more importantly, Internet connectivity, to the entire world.
The relationship between these two stories is more than circumstantial. On the one hand, we've got a fight over who controls the Internet, led by a lot of countries who think that the Internet is too free to begin with. On the other hand we've got the ability to wire a huge chunk of the economically and technologically disadvantaged part of the world—exactly the same part of the world whose leaders want to restrict their access.
Global Internet usage has more than doubled in the last few years. Interestingly, however, the greatest growth percentages have not been in the United States, but in the developing areas of the Middle East and Africa.
In a world where insurgents and dissidents regularly announce their activities via the Web to a global audience, it may be hard to underestimate the impact that global Internet access has had up until this point.
And while the often-repressive regimes in these areas have been relatively slow to catch on to the impact of the Net on their citizens, they're now starting to wake up and realize that the power of information and global connectivity makes them more and more vulnerable. And they don't like it one bit.
The potential of connectivity in the hands of the world and the ability to keep the Net open and free is vital to the future political, cultural, and economic development of the world. Unfettered by state controls on information and resources, people in previously walled-off countries will have power to sell their products directly, interact with the global community, and have their views heard.
There have been several small experiments in combining e-commerce with indigenous production (such as this one at the university where I work) and resources such as MIT's OpenCourseWare project have begun to provide anyone online anywhere in the world with the tools for a world-class education.
We're now beginning to just see the effects of a global Internet on a world economy. Some of its effects haven't been good for the United States and other previously comfortable Western powers. (Outsourcing comes to mind, as does the ability of terrorists to communicate anonymously via the Net.)
But in the long run, more open access and more people on the Net mean global markets, increased entrepreneurship and innovation, more universal access to knowledge, free speech and a closer world community. Free and open access to the Internet is a benefit to all. Let's hope that the $100 laptops succeed and that control of the Internet remains in free hands.
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