Over the past three days, the World Summit on the Information Society has been taking place in Tunis, the capital of Tunesia.
Okay, so the venue is a joke. Tunesia is a sick dictatorship where professors and their students get 13-year jail sentences for merely opening a 'forbidden' website. If anything, the summit has served to highlight the repressive nature of the Tunesian regime. Those who want to have a good laugh at the sorry buggers should read this article in The Guardian about their failed attempts to stifle ngo's.
However, the most important issue debated at the conference is essential for the future of Internet freedom and it concerns us all. The summit is supposed to decide on a plan for the future governance of the Net. At issue is the technical management of the core resources of the Net: Domain Names, IP addresses, Internet Protocols and the Root Server System. Some of the following information is borrowed from the paper Beyond ICANN vs. ITU? (2004) by Wolfgang Kleinwächter.
The US and the EU, supported by the private industry, have long argued that the American private firm Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) with its narrowly defined technical mandate should continue to be the leading organisation.
Other governments, led by China and members of the G20 group like Brazil, South Africa and India, based their arguments on a broader definition. Their understanding of “Internet Governance” included not only domain names and root servers but also other Internet related issues like spam and illegal content. They wanted to move the whole Internet management system under the umbrella of an intergovernmental organisation of the United Nations, notably the “International Telecommunication Union” (ITU), which hosted the first phase of the WSIS.
Ngo's critical of both governments and ICANN did not support an “intergovernmental solution” but argued in favour of a “decentralized mechanism” with different organisations with different core responsibilities.
In October 2005, the EU announced that it would support plans to end the US government's unilateral control of the Internet and put in place a new body that would now run this revolutionary communications medium. The reason given by British Commissioner Henson was that last June, the American Department of Commerce (DoC) announced that although ICANN would continue to run the Internet Top Level, the DoC itself would retain "indefinite" overall control over the root servers, i.e. the basic directory for the Net.
The U.S. government would thus be able to keep the upper hand in all Internet-arguments about intellectual property rights, national security, violation of individual privacy, preservation of cultural values and protection from so-called unwanted content. Although content restraints are most powerful and pervasive in non-democratic regimes, many democratic countries including the U.S. are also seeking to police the Internet.
If this is to be the case "indefinitely", the EU wants to exert its own control over its own portion of the Net. Hence the EU proposal to move the Top Level management of the Internet to an intergovernmental organisation of the United Nations, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
What do you guys think? Should the Intetnet ultimately be controlled by faceless bureaucrats serving U.S. economic and national security interests, or by a bunch of faceless bureaucrats representing some of the world's worst dictatorships?
Is there a way out of this dilemma, can we secure freedom of expression on the Interet in other ways?
