186
Milton L. Mueller
International Incidents
The Chinese Communist Party has more direct authority over the domestic institutional environment than it does over the international regime. It has used this authority to create a comprehensive system of blocking/censorship, public-opinion
management, and intermediary responsibility that has come to be known colloquially
as the Great Firewall of China. Even so, its attempt to maintain and enforce cybernationalism is challenged domestically by four tendencies: the need for Internet
operations to be globally coordinated and compatible; the ability of domestic actors
to grasp the communicative opportunities of the Internet; the greater transparency
fostered by Internet communications; and China ’ s need to maintain trade relationships with the rest of the world.
The China country profi le in this volume covers the domestic situation in more
detail. This chapter focuses instead on the way China ’ s attempt to maintain cybernationalism has interacted or confl icted with the globalized nature of Internet operations and governance. It describes the way the Chinese state ’ s attempt to tamper with
the domain name system to support censorship “ spilled out ” into the rest of the world.
It looks next at a routing misconfi guration incident that created a minipanic in the
United States. Then it shows how cyber espionage efforts traced to China are also
shaping global attitudes toward Internet governance.
Exporting the Great Firewall?
DNS root servers tell Internet users where to fi nd the information needed to connect
to other domains. In March 2010, Internet users outside China found that their access
to popular Web sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter was impaired. The
problem, which was known to affect users in Chile and California, was eventually
traced to their use of root servers located in China.
15
The origins of this story go back to the early days of ICANN, when U.S. control of
the DNS was becoming a global political issue. Root servers are the starting point for
the hierarchical resolution process that makes domain names globally unique and
matches IP addresses to domains. Because of the Internet ’ s U.S. origins, all but three
of the world ’ s 13 root servers were located in the United States; a few were run by the
U.S. military. Many national leaders (assuming they were aware of the problem)
viewed this as an unacceptable kind of dependency on a foreign power. Although
many of the people who were concerned about this had no idea what a DNS root
server actually does, they were quite sure that they wanted one in their country. And
there were, in fact, legitimate technical reasons supporting a greater geographical
diversifi cation of the root server infrastructure, such as greater resiliency in the face
of outages and reduced latency in response times.
Milton L. Mueller
International Incidents
The Chinese Communist Party has more direct authority over the domestic institutional environment than it does over the international regime. It has used this authority to create a comprehensive system of blocking/censorship, public-opinion
management, and intermediary responsibility that has come to be known colloquially
as the Great Firewall of China. Even so, its attempt to maintain and enforce cybernationalism is challenged domestically by four tendencies: the need for Internet
operations to be globally coordinated and compatible; the ability of domestic actors
to grasp the communicative opportunities of the Internet; the greater transparency
fostered by Internet communications; and China ’ s need to maintain trade relationships with the rest of the world.
The China country profi le in this volume covers the domestic situation in more
detail. This chapter focuses instead on the way China ’ s attempt to maintain cybernationalism has interacted or confl icted with the globalized nature of Internet operations and governance. It describes the way the Chinese state ’ s attempt to tamper with
the domain name system to support censorship “ spilled out ” into the rest of the world.
It looks next at a routing misconfi guration incident that created a minipanic in the
United States. Then it shows how cyber espionage efforts traced to China are also
shaping global attitudes toward Internet governance.
Exporting the Great Firewall?
DNS root servers tell Internet users where to fi nd the information needed to connect
to other domains. In March 2010, Internet users outside China found that their access
to popular Web sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter was impaired. The
problem, which was known to affect users in Chile and California, was eventually
traced to their use of root servers located in China.
15
The origins of this story go back to the early days of ICANN, when U.S. control of
the DNS was becoming a global political issue. Root servers are the starting point for
the hierarchical resolution process that makes domain names globally unique and
matches IP addresses to domains. Because of the Internet ’ s U.S. origins, all but three
of the world ’ s 13 root servers were located in the United States; a few were run by the
U.S. military. Many national leaders (assuming they were aware of the problem)
viewed this as an unacceptable kind of dependency on a foreign power. Although
many of the people who were concerned about this had no idea what a DNS root
server actually does, they were quite sure that they wanted one in their country. And
there were, in fact, legitimate technical reasons supporting a greater geographical
diversifi cation of the root server infrastructure, such as greater resiliency in the face
of outages and reduced latency in response times.