A fractured internet?

When the Internet Nearly Fractured, and How It Could Happen Again
The Atlantic (02/24/11) Nancy Scola

The Internet was nearly splintered in the late 1990s when Eugene Kashpureff, unhappy with what he saw as the emerging Net's dominance by academics, industry figures, and government entities, established AlterNIC, an alternative domain name registration service that allowed anyone in the world to register a Web site on Kashpureff's top-level domains (TLDs). He later raised the stakes by diverting traffic intended for InterNIC, which managed the majority of domain name registrations on major TLDs. Internet Software Consortium co-founder Paul Vixie says fracturing the domain name system (DNS) would divide the Internet so that users might never know where to go to locate domains, or what they might get, which could result in chaos. Recently, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Immigrations and Customs Enforcement division and the Department of Justice seized Web sites thought to engage in offensive activities, and Congress is considering legislation that would enable the Attorney General to blacklist Web site names. Such developments have heightened the controversy surrounding the central role of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and U.S. influence over Internet governance, and there have been sizable initiatives to shift power from ICANN toward a globally accountable entity. These and other sources of tension have raised concerns that a balkanization of the Internet could result.

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