International Cooperation Said Critical to Future Internet

The term “Internet governance” emerged in the context of a conflict between traditional ideas of “government” and evolving ideas about collective decision-making, said Markus Kummer, executive coordinator of the Secretariat of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum. The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) chose a multistakeholder approach involving all interested parties, governments included, he said. Internet governance can be based on sharing information and best practices, and on raising awareness, which also applies to the Internet of things, Kummer said. There may be no need for new forms of governance, just more of the same bottom-up consensus of the Internet community, he said.

Governance will be more of a public issue as radio frequency identification (RFID) looms larger in everyday life, said a European Commission representative. We “shouldn’t reinvent the wheel when we can avoid it,” but should continue to use WSIS principles in an expanded Internet environment, he said.

The Internet of things marries EPC standards, RFID and the DNS, said Milton Mueller, director of Syracuse University’s Telecommunications Network Management Program. Manufacturers code products according to EPC standards and insert RFID tags that retailers use track products through the supply chain, he said. This private trading network system, unlike the DNS, is not necessarily linked globally, and the real money is in product-code discovery, not domain names per se, he said.

The evaluation of the Internet of things raises new questions about international cooperation demanding that all players to be at the table, said ICANN President Paul Twomey. Each brings particular cultural, linguistic and other expectations and perceptions, he said. He cautioned against using the phrase “Internet of things,” saying it risks colliding with diverse ideas about “Internet” and “network.” The network of things should retain the Internet’s core principles and be a single, global, interoperable system, Twomey said.

The U.S. wants international cooperation in four key areas, most importantly network security, said Meredith Baker, NTIA acting assistant secretary for communications and information. This year’s DNS cache-poisoning vulnerability recently identified by security expert Dan Kaminski sparked an unprecedented effort to develop patches, but the long-term solution to such attacks is deployment of domain name system security extensions (DNSSEC), she said.

NTIA will issue a notice of inquiry on DNSSEC rollout this week, Baker said. As it considers deployment, it’s critical that all interested parties have their say, she said. So far, NTIA has fielded half a dozen proposals from VeriSign, root zone operators, NIST and ICANN. More proposals may come, she said, declining to comment on proposals’ chances of being adopted. The proposals differ in their choice of Key Signing Key authority, Baker said. Some think DNSSEC is at risk of becoming obsolete as a result of other efforts, such as a trust anchor repository under way at ICANN.

Other major areas for international cooperation as seen by the U.S. are development of automated technical functions to allow new services and applications to emerge at the edge of the Internet, transition from Internet Protocol version 4 to IPv6 and efficient and effective use of spectrum for RFID and other functions, Baker said.

The Internet of things poses challenges to Internet architecture and applications, said the EC official. It will need open platforms without proprietary standards, and global cooperation to harmonize interoperability, he said. Harmonized spectrum for Internet of things devices should be made available, he said.

The EC worries about network security and stability, its representative said. RFID shares at the export layer some issues affecting today’s Internet, such as distributed denial-of-service attacks, spam and identity theft, yet global cooperation on these issues still is lacking, he said. Specific problems relate to RFID, like unauthorized access and the RFID infrastructure’s own integrity, he said. DNSSEC could help solve the authentication problem but if the system were so easy it would have been rolled out by now, he said.

The Internet of things will run on an object naming service (ONS), a global database for registering product codes under EPC (electronic product code) Global Standards. The authoritative ONS root, created in the U.S. years ago, is operated by VeriSign, said Bernard Benhamou, delegate on Internet usage, French ministry or research and higher education. France is working on the first non-U.S. root (WID Oct 7 p2), and believes ONS roots will need a distributed, peer-to-peer system, he said.

Some seem to think a European ONS root would solve everything, Patrik Falstrom, Cisco Systems senior consulting engineer, disputing that claim. No one even has begun to consider how existing privacy, competition and antitrust rules might apply to the Internet of things, he said.

The DNS root suffers from having a single point of control due to U.S. opposition to competing roots, Mueller said. The DNS root is powerful, he said: It can yank top- level domains out of the root, exercise substantial control over market entry, create a choke point and know what data are queried from the root.

But the ONS root has scant political dimension, because it involves trading partners, giving governments little incentive to insert themselves into its structure, Mueller said. Competing roots may splinter trading networks but don’t threaten competition, he said. The governance debate should focus on how to keep governments from injecting political fragmentation into trading networks, and how to govern commercial services associated with EPC sharing, he said.

The ONS offers two possible outcomes, said Mathieu Weill, general manager of the French Network Information Center. It will remain an industry-specific “piece of middleware,” or become an essential service of the Internet of things, used freely by all application on the Net. The second scenario triggers more governmental interest because it implicates issues of interoperability and open standards, stakeholder involvement, privacy concerns and sovereignty, he said. That outcome’s benefits far outweigh the costs of additional governance challenges, he said.