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Much ado about net.governance

Should the United States control the Internet? Or the United Nations? Fact is, the Internet has no real "control" other than the system for assigning domain numbers and names, so politicos focus on that aspect as "Internet governance" and argue at length about it. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) . It is more specifically responsible for "Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management, and root server system management functions." There's political contention now over U.S. control via supervision of the Internet addressing system, and some want that to be a cooperative international endeavor. Jeanette Hoffman of the Internet Governance Caucus has a good point about the potential for the UN to assume reponsibility: "The UN is not a good body to run the Internet," she says. "We don't want nondemocratic countries to have influence over a system that is so important to the freedom of expression." From the International Herald Tribune:

Groups representing Web surfers at the talks complained that the dispute between the United States and the rest of the world over administration is overshadowing more important issues, such as cleaning up spam from e-mail systems and combating cyber crime and identity theft, areas where they say governments should play a more active role.

"I think the debate here is not all that relevant to people that use the Internet," said Lynne St. Amour, chief executive of the Internet Society, a nonprofit organization based in Reston, Virginia. "The row is largely because of the geopolitical situation."

While nations feud over who should authorize the use of domain names, experts say the real power is likely to remain with the one billion users of a system that unifies almost a quarter million networks and is largely democratic in the way it operates.

jon posted this at 9:15 AM
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