Gordon Goldstein

[Commentary] The future of the internet could be at stake at a conference in Tunisia, where diplomats from more than 100 countries will debate United Nations jurisdiction over the web.

What emerges from the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly will affect geopolitics and global economic growth, and possibly internet freedom for billions of users. Diplomats will discuss the emerging Internet of Things, which will soon connect tens of billions of devices and people to the global network. A new navigational and addressing technology, Digital Object Architecture (DOA), could enable the real-time surveillance and tracking of each device and individual connected to the web. Some governments are advocating that DOA be the singular and mandatory addressing system for the Internet of Things. They also want this system to be centrally controlled by the UN’s International Telecommunication Union, which has contractual rights to the underlying intellectual property. China is working to join the leadership of the global study group on DOA and the Internet of Things.

America must quickly move beyond the divisive argument about ICANN and regain its internet-policy footing. Many more consequential battles over internet freedom loom—conflicts that will shape the digital future. It is time for the US to unify again behind a bipartisan vision and common strategy to safeguard internet freedom for tomorrow.

[McDowell, a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Goldstein is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.]

[Commentary] The World Wide Web celebrated its 25th birthday recently. Today the global network serves almost 3 billion people, and hundreds of thousands more join each day.

If the Internet were a country, its economy would be among the five largest in the world. Yet all of this growth and increasing connectedness, which can seem both effortless and unstoppable, is now creating enormous friction, as yet largely invisible to the average surfer. Fierce and rising geopolitical conflict over control of the global network threatens to create a balkanized system -- what some technorati, including Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, have called “the splinternet.”

Some experts anticipate a future with a Brazilian Internet, a European Internet, an Iranian Internet, an Egyptian Internet -- all with different content regulations and trade rules, and perhaps with contrasting standards and operational protocols. Whether or not this fragmentation can be managed is up to question, but at a minimum, this patchwork solution would be disruptive to American companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and eBay, which would see their global reach diminished. And it would make international communications and commerce more costly.