MALAWI UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
MALAWI INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
COMPUTER SCIENCE AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
DEPARTMENT
COURSE TITLE: ADVANCED COMPUTER NETWORKS
COURSE CODE: CNET-321
ASSIGNMENT 1: INTRODUCTION TO INTERNET
GOVERNANCE
FROM: AUDREY MWALE (CIS-049-16)
TO: Mr. W. GONDWE
DUE DATE: 6Th FEBRUARY, 2019. 5PM.
QUESTION 1
A. Traditional state-centered, multilateral governance entails that three or more states
corporate by making an alliance that requires them to discuss how to govern their
states by agreeing on certain policies that should be followed by all entities involved.
Now, to look at it from an internet perspective, it would mean the governments have
major influence on how the internet is run. The multi-stakeholder approach, on the
other hand entails being more transparent in operations to ensure credibility, and
encourages openness to input from “stake” holders of which comprise of people from
different societies, with different perspectives, different backgrounds but common
goals to discuss how different dimensions of the internet should be governed. This
therefore, allows non-state institutions and simple ordinary users of the internet to
have a say on how the internet and its services are run, and take part in shaping its
evolution. This has in one way or the other led to the establishment of different
organizations tasked with different roles to play on how the internet should be run and
regulated, like the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), the Working Group on Internet
Governance (WGIG) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
(ICANN). In short, the multi-stakeholder approach is important because it offers the
following advantages over traditional state-centered, multilateral governance:
a) State and Non-State actors cooperating.
b) Bottom-up multilateralism/vertical and horizontal processes
c) Learning as mode of policy making
d) Inclusive
e) Democratic
B. Between 1994 and 1998 when countries, and different institutions started realizing the
global power and influence inherent in the internet itself that would soon unravel in
the foreseeable future, the US National Science Foundation decided to subcontract the
management of the key feature of the internet, the Domain Name System, to a private
US Company named Network Solutions Inc. The Internet community did not have a
positive reception for this move, as it threated the decentralized-nature of the internet.
This so called-war DNS war introduced new players into the game, different
businesses, institutions, and governments and so on. Most bodies did not agree with
this because they felt the U.S would have too much control over the affairs of the
internet. The issue finally came to an end in 1998, with the establishment of a new
organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN),
which coordinates of most of the internet’s technical resources, based on a contract
with the US which in turn still causes some debate in the internet community, since
the situation had been resolved but still left some unanswered questions on how
exactly ICANN shall operate.
C. The narrow approach focusses more on the technical parts of the internet, the actual
underlying structure and how it’s implemented, which means dealing more with
issues like protocols, services and DNS and ICANN’s position as a key actor. The
broader approach on the other hand finds it important to take into consideration other
perimeters such sociocultural, political, economic and legal issues, which means
considering social norms and ethics. The later approach is explored into more detail
by WGIG, WSIS and IGF. In my opinion, the broad approach is better since it doesn’t
necessarily discard the narrow approach but it tries to add more dimensions to it to
make the internet a more flexible and open platform that can be appreciated by
everyone.
D. Net neutrality is the principle that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should enable
access to all content and applications regardless of the source, without favoring or
blocking particular products or websites. All sites and data should be regarded as
equal, meaning charges for services should be standard. Without net neutrality ISPs
would be able to strike deals with content providers to have their sites load faster than
their competitors, or even block the competitors of said content providers, this would
hinder the requirement that the internet be open and fair for all legal sites.
QUESTION 2
A. I. Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a nonprofit private American
corporation that oversees global Internet Protocol (IP) address allocation, root zone
management in the domain name system, media types, and other internet protocol-
related symbols and internet numbers.
II. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN) is the private non-
profit institution tasked with overseeing core internet infrastructures like coordinating
the Domain Name System (DNS), IP addresses, space allocation, Protocol identifier
assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain Name
Systems, and root server system management systems.
III. Regional Internet Registries (AfriNIC, APNIC, RIPE NCC, ARIN, LACNIC) are
non for profit organizations who have authority within their regions to administer and
register ip address numbers and to provide related services.
IV. Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the body that defines standard internet
operating protocols such as TCP/IP.
V. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where
member organizations, a full time staff and the public work together to develop web
standards; developing protocols and guidelines that ensure the long term growth of the
web.
VI. International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is an agency of the united nations
whose purpose is to coordinate telecommunication operations and services throughout
the world.
B. Root Servers are a network of hundreds of servers in many countries of the world that
serve the DNS root zone, in which they are configured as 13 named authorities. They
publish root zone file contents, which are responsible for DNS functionality, that
maintain a hierarchical view of the internet and its services. These servers act as the
backbone of the internet and are independent of each other in such a way that if one
fails it wouldn’t affect the operation of other root servers and the other root servers
can go through the root zone file to “bring back online” the failed server (considerably
strengthened by the Anycast scheme, which replicates root servers throughout the
world) by ensuring that there is considerable time to reactivate the server or to create
a new one before any functional abnormalities can be noticed.
QUESTION 3
A. Digital divide refers to differences in access to and uses of information technology,
the social gap between those who have access to and use computers and the Internet
and many factors contribute to this phenomenon including income, race and ethnicity,
gender, age, place of residence, and other measures of socioeconomic status.
B. I. Costs for interactions with international ISPs: Due to differences in billing rates in
different countries all over the world, ISPs have to agree on costs of using each
other’s channels of communication.
II. Electricity bills for the offices and sites: These are mostly fixed expenditures that
are agreed upon based on the power consumption expected or measured from the ISPs
electric device power ratings.
III. Markerting and advertisements: The ISPs have to pay other media outlets to
advertise their services, promotions and data plans for internet usage.
C. Increasing number of competitors is not enough, also most of the ISPs are still using
facilities are not up to date, of limited frequency bands and there is need for
establishing more connection points (transmitters) and even collaboration of different
ISPs to come up with better innovations, but the market is currently more divided than
united, all ISPs are on the quest to be the outstanding ISP instead of concentrating on
increasing efficiency.
