Telecoms monopolies a threat to Internet growth

An international meeting on the future of the Internet is under way in Nairobi.

Internet has accelerated commerce globally and is at a defining moment.

Internet addresses on the current platform IPV4, are rapidly declining, helped by the massive uptake of new technologies in emerging economies.

An analysis by network technology firm Cisco projects that the pool of IPV4 addresses will have run out by mid next year.

It is estimated that only 10 per cent of the possible 4.3 billion addresses are remaining.

The viable solution is seen in IPV6, a new platform with a huge capacity to provide billions of addresses.

Apart from access concerns, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is hosting the meeting, has come under sharp criticism for not allowing the registration of more domain names.

But ICANN says it is working on issuing new names and says fears of shortage of IPV6 addresses are not accurate.

Business Daily spoke to Rod Beckstrom, the CEO of ICANN, the body that allocates and co-ordinates Internet addresses, on the sidelines of the Nairobi meeting.

There is an ongoing concern about the depletion of IPV4 addresses and the likely consequences. What is the status of the addresses globally and in developing countries?

First of all, there is an excellent regional Internet registry here (Afrinic) which has done a really great job. It is serving 800 Internet service providers and other technology companies that consume and need Internet addresses in Africa. It is an example of one of the best functioning regional Internet registries in the world and has been allocating IPV4 and IPV6.

Under IPV6, they have made some allocations in Africa — to give you an idea of the scale of those addresses, the smallest blocks of IPV6 that one can allocate has tens of trillions of addresses.

The current Internet uses several billions, so Africa already has an aggregate of trillions of IPV6 addresses and there is no shortage. Every single ISP in Africa that requests the addresses from Afrinic and demonstrates a need will receive one or several trillion address blocks. There are therefore more than enough IPV6 addresses.

The major problem has not been the availability of IPV6 addresses from ICANN or the regional registries. Rather, it is feared that a slow rollout of IPV6 networks will deny organisations the benefit of its numerous addresses once those on IPV4 run out.

I think Africa is on track with regard to deployment of IPV6.

A number of countries have been complaining about lack of inclusion in top Internet organisations like ICANN where they can contribute to policies governing Internet. How can their inclusion be promoted?

We want to see Africa take a more active role. Fewer than 20 per cent of African countries have a seat on ICANN’s governance advisory committee compared to about 60 per cent of other countries in the rest of the world, so we need African leaders to step forward to engage in policy making that will affect the future of the Internet. This will help dispel false rumours, for instance, that there are not enough IPV6 addresses for Africa.

Kenya has been involved for many years and we appreciate that. Including South Africa, there are eight other countries in the continent that have had some level of involvement. Over 40 have had zero involvement. All countries, however, have country code domain names like .ke, .tz and so they have some relationship with ICANN.

What we are asking of African countries is to commit some of their senior people in telecoms policy or commerce to join the governance advisory committee because if Africa doesn’t have representation there, how can it shape the policies and be informed on where the Internet is going?

What new developments can we expect from ICANN?

One is the internationalised domain names that make the Internet friendlier to non-English speakers and we are hoping African countries will be interested. We are also working on new generic top level domains. In Africa, for instance, we’ve already received an application letter for .zulu from King Goodwill Zwelithini of the Zulu nation who wants to secure it for his people.

We have, through the press, heard that other parties want to have .africa. Generic top level domains is a project ICANN has been working on for six years. These new domains will expand choice and deepen the usage of the internet. There are some critical meetings around this particular issue here in Nairobi.

What can emerging economies do to exploit the internet further?

The first thing is for African countries to follow the Kenyan model of deregulation and decentralisation of telecommunications and Internet policies so that we have competition, which is key. Telecoms monopolies are horrible. They tax the poor for the benefit of a few. So the most important thing for developing countries is competition to drive higher bandwidth at lower prices in the telecoms sector. In Kenya, Internet bundles are cheaper than some places in America.

Another critical point is that we should keep the Internet unified. There are countries that want to break the unified model of the Internet because they want more control or they want to create their own local Internet address monopolies. That temptation is a grave risk to development.

It is a big threat, especially to developing countries that have benefited from a unified Internet.

It was not clear whether the Nairobi meeting would take place or not. Some participants cited security as their reservations for coming to Nairobi but eventually everything took off as planned. What changed?

Some people had problems about our meeting in Kenya. I thought it was critical that we come to Kenya, that we come to Sub-Saharan Africa.

Despite a lot of criticism of me and even of the organisation from all different directions, we decided to come because Africa is a critical part of the future.

There are a billion people here and almost all of them will have Internet access through phones or computers within the next 10 or 15 years.