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Governance of the internet

LESS THAN A fortnight before the United Nations-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society is to take place in Geneva, there remain wide differences between countries on the text of the declaration and the plan of action that is to be adopted at the first ever multilateral conference on harnessing information and communication technologies (ICT) for development. The summit was conceived as an opportunity for governments, the private sector and civil society to promote the use of ICT to attain the U.N. Millennium Development Goals and facilitate the use of digital services in the developing countries. However, as usually happens in the run-up to U.N. summits, negotiators find themselves unable to agree until the very last minute on a couple of issues. The financing of programmes to bridge the digital divide has emerged as one sticking point and governance or administration of the internet as the other. While finance or the need for additional resources is always a problem at the U.N. that is ultimately settled with a compromise solution, the issue of who should administer the internet is a potentially more difficult issue to resolve.

The unique naming system on the internet that gives each domain a particular address is currently administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a U.S.-based non-profit organisation. Domain names with country suffixes like ".in" for India are under the administration of national registers but the more valuable generic suffixes like ".org" and ".com" are under the control of ICANN. This is a legacy of the evolution of the internet in the U.S. and ICANN has been licensed by the U.S. Government to oversee management of names and addresses on the internet. ICANN's board is dominated by representatives from the North and its control over internet governance has come under criticism on many fronts. One criticism, which has surfaced in the preparations for the WSIS, is that as the internet has long since ceased to be a U.S. monopoly and since it is growing by the day across the world, ICANN can no longer be the controlling agency. One proposal is that administrative and technical matters like resource allocation and management of names should be handed over to a multilateral organisation like the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) of the U.N. The tussle over who should be in charge of internet governance has become a North-South divide. The developing countries want the ITU to be given charge of internet governance, while the United States, the European Union and Japan want responsibility for administration to remain with ICANN.

There can be genuine concerns that ITU administration of the internet will lead to bureaucratic control over cyber resources. But the non-transparent and unrepresentative ways of functioning of ICANN are not suited to the governance of what has become a global resource. Fears that U.N. control will kill the spirit of spontaneity that has given the internet its special character are misplaced. At stake here is the system for giving organisations their unique addresses, not the regulation of content. However, as the internet expands by the day and as abuses such as child pornography and spam become more widespread, it is inevitable that certain issues concerning content will also become the subject of discussion for possible international regulation. Given the implications of a change in the administration of the internet, it is unlikely that this issue will be resolved at the "first segment" of the World Summit on the Information Society. It will in all likelihood be placed on the agenda of the second segment of the summit that is scheduled to be held in Tunisia in 2005. But who governs the internet is an issue that has to be settled sooner rather than later.

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