Global Ideal, National Reality. (ICANN)

Global Ideal, National Reality

By

Jonathan Blavin and Jeremy Kutner

In early June 2000, a European coalition of companies and nonprofit groups that administer 30 country code domains in Europe voted to refuse to pay ICANN the nearly $1 million in bills they owed to the organization.(1) While some of the members objected to the way ICANN levees fees without any formal legal agreements, others feared that ICANN might ultimately desire to take away their ability to register domain names in the ccTLDs they had authority over, giving control of the domains back to governments or indeed, remove ccTLDs altogether. Several small countries that initially sold the rights to their ccTLDs to private registrar companies are demanding the return of their domains(2) . Willie Black, who runs a British nonprofit organization that registers domain names in the .uk domain, articulated the increasingly nationalist perceptions engulfing ICANN: “This is seen by us to be a domain name tax by a U.S. corporation on our sovereign top-level domains.”(3) Are ccTLDs an extension of state sovereignty, or are they merely remnants of a, now outdated, system created by Jon Postel to ease administration?

Wasn’t the Internet supposed to create a borderless universe where remnants of nationalism have no place? This global ideal seems to have been slowly displaced by a nationalist reality. Martin Irvine, director of the Communication, Culture, and Technology Program at Georgetown University, describes this phenomenon as global localization: “Globalization, in one manifestation, is global localization; political groups use the Net to promote local interests and identity politics rooted in very historic place-governed issues like race, nation, territory, and language.”(4) Though it is a major force behind globalization, the Internet also creates new methods of information expression and dissemination for nationalist movements; web pages for Scottish, Basque, and Quebeçois movements are prevalent on the Internet.

The Internet is the clearest example of an artificial construct,(5) in both senses. More important, perhaps, is that the Internet is the phenomenon m...

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