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U.S. retains hold on Internet

Kieren McCarthy

Tunis: An expected fight over the governance of the Internet looked to have been averted on Tuesday night as a tentative deal was struck which would allow the U.S. Government to retain overall control of the medium for the foreseeable future.

As delegates arrived for Wednesday's opening of the U.N.-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in the Tunisian capital, bureaucrats who had been locked in three days of pre-summit meetings reckoned they had a compromise.

The U.S. Government will retain overall control of the technology which powers the Internet — its domain name system, root servers and the oversight of the California-based, not-for-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which looks after it all — for the foreseeable future.

An Internet Governance Forum will be created to discuss and decide upon the over-reaching issues of the Internet, but, crucially, will not have any oversight powers. Governments have also agreed to work within existing organisations and infrastructures to gradually transform the way the Internet is run.

It is a far cry from the inter-governmental oversight body that was proposed by the European Union in September. That proposal, which shocked the U.S. as much as it pleased Brazil, China and Iran, pushed the previously unnoticed issue of Internet governance on to the world stage and turned the topic into the main focus of the WSIS.

Just as surprising as the E.U.'s proposal, however, has been its failure to push that model in Tunis this week. Internet watchers were puzzled by the E.U.'s backtracking.

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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