TUNIS, Tunisia (AP) -- A summit focusing on narrowing the digital divide between the rich and poor residents and countries opened Wednesday with an agreement of sorts on who will maintain ultimate oversight of the Internet and the flow of information, commerce and dissent.
The World Summit on the Information Society had been overshadowed by a lingering, if not vocal, struggle about overseeing the domain names and technical issues that make the Internet work and keep people from Pakistan to Canada surfing Web sites in the search for information, news and buying and selling.
Negotiators from more than 100 countries agreed late Tuesday to leave the United States in charge of the Internet's addressing system, averting a U.S.-EU showdown at this week's U.N. technology summit.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/interne....ap/index.html
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,69592,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_7
So who should control the net?
ICANN currently controls a big part of the net:
ICANN (pronounced "I can") is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It is a California based non-profit corporation consisting largely of Internet Society Members, and was created on September 18, 1998 in order to take over a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed on behalf of the US Government by other organizations, notably IANA.
The contract for ICANN came from the US Department of Commerce and was "sole sourced", which means no-one else (such as the Open Root Server Confederation which was also formed at the time to bid on the contract) was able to submit a bid to perform the task. These tasks include managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses. To date, much of its work has concerned the introduction of seven new generic top-level domains. Its activities, however, are very controversial.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN
___________
The big challenge to ICANN control of the internet comes from:
The Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) is a United Nations group set up after the failure of the 2003 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) to agree on the future of Internet governance. It is a challenge to the role of ICANN, the United States organisation which currently oversees a large portion of Internet administration but actually only has a narrow technical remit. It usually takes only an advisory role, but many countries, particularly developing nations, are unhappy at the prospect of the U.S. maintaining control of the future of the Internet and have formed the WGIG as a more worldwide approach at management.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working...net_Governance
In general, the choices for a body to control aspects of the net involve:
Public/government organization versus private
Profit versus non profit
Regulation of content versus regulation solely of technical issues
I do NOT think that a multinational body should have anything, at all, to do with regulating the content of websites and who can access what. That would crash the internet as everyone knows it now and start non stop huge political fights over content.
The World Summit on the Information Society had been overshadowed by a lingering, if not vocal, struggle about overseeing the domain names and technical issues that make the Internet work and keep people from Pakistan to Canada surfing Web sites in the search for information, news and buying and selling.
Negotiators from more than 100 countries agreed late Tuesday to leave the United States in charge of the Internet's addressing system, averting a U.S.-EU showdown at this week's U.N. technology summit.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/interne....ap/index.html
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,69592,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_7
So who should control the net?
ICANN currently controls a big part of the net:
ICANN (pronounced "I can") is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It is a California based non-profit corporation consisting largely of Internet Society Members, and was created on September 18, 1998 in order to take over a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed on behalf of the US Government by other organizations, notably IANA.
The contract for ICANN came from the US Department of Commerce and was "sole sourced", which means no-one else (such as the Open Root Server Confederation which was also formed at the time to bid on the contract) was able to submit a bid to perform the task. These tasks include managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses. To date, much of its work has concerned the introduction of seven new generic top-level domains. Its activities, however, are very controversial.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN
___________
The big challenge to ICANN control of the internet comes from:
The Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) is a United Nations group set up after the failure of the 2003 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) to agree on the future of Internet governance. It is a challenge to the role of ICANN, the United States organisation which currently oversees a large portion of Internet administration but actually only has a narrow technical remit. It usually takes only an advisory role, but many countries, particularly developing nations, are unhappy at the prospect of the U.S. maintaining control of the future of the Internet and have formed the WGIG as a more worldwide approach at management.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working...net_Governance
In general, the choices for a body to control aspects of the net involve:
Public/government organization versus private
Profit versus non profit
Regulation of content versus regulation solely of technical issues
I do NOT think that a multinational body should have anything, at all, to do with regulating the content of websites and who can access what. That would crash the internet as everyone knows it now and start non stop huge political fights over content.
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