[WSIS CS-Plenary] New Yort Times article

[Dr. Francis MUGUET]

FYI

EU Tries to Unblock Internet Impasse

By TOM WRIGHT
International Herald Tribune
Published: September 30, 2005

The United States and Europe clashed here Thursday in one of their 
sharpest public disagreements in months, after European Union 
negotiators proposed stripping the Americans of their effective control 
of the Internet.

The European decision to back the rest of the world in demanding the 
creation of a new international body to govern the Internet clearly 
caught the Americans off balance and left them largely isolated at talks 
designed to come up with a new way of regulating the digital traffic of 
the 21st century.

"It's a very shocking and profound change of the EU's position," said 
David Gross, the State Department official in charge of America's 
international communications policy. "The EU's proposal seems to 
represent an historic shift in the regulatory approach to the Internet 
from one that is based on private sector leadership to a government, 
top-down control of the Internet."

Delegates meeting in Geneva for the past two weeks had been hoping to 
reach consensus for a draft document by Friday after two years of 
debate. The talks on international digital issues, called the World 
Summit on the Information Society and organized by the United Nations, 
were scheduled to conclude in November at a meeting in Tunisia. Instead, 
the talks have deadlocked, with the United States fighting a solitary 
battle against countries that want to see a global body take over 
supervision of the Internet.

The United States lost its only ally late Wednesday when the EU made a 
surprise proposal to create an intergovernmental body that would set 
principles for running the Internet. Currently, the U.S. Commerce 
Department approves changes to the Internet's "root zone files," which 
are administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and 
Numbers, or Icann, a nonprofit organization based in Marina del Rey, 
California.

Political unease with the U.S. approach, symbolized by opposition to the 
war in Iraq, has spilled over into these technical discussions, 
delegates said. The EU and developing nations, they added, wanted to 
send a signal to America that it could not run things alone. Opposition 
to Washington's continued dominance of the Internet was illustrated by a 
statement released last week by the Brazilian delegation to the talks. 
"On Internet governance, three words tend to come to mind: lack of 
legitimacy. In our digital world, only one nation decides for all of us."

In its new proposal, the EU said the new body could set guidelines on 
who gets control of what Internet address - the main mechanism for 
finding information across the global network - and could play a role in 
helping to set up a system for resolving disputes.

"The role of governments in the new cooperation model should be mainly 
focused on principle issues of public policy, excluding any involvement 
in the day-to-day operations," the proposal said. The new model "should 
not replace existing mechanisms or institutions," it added. The proposal 
was vague but left open the possibility, fiercely opposed by Washington, 
that the United Nations itself could have some future governing role.

The United States has sharply criticized demands, like one made last 
week by Iran, for a UN body to govern the Internet, Gross said. "No 
intergovernmental body should control the Internet," he said, "whether 
it's the UN or any other." U.S. officials argue that a system like the 
one proposed by the EU would lead to unwanted bureaucratization of the 
Internet.

"I think the U.S. is overreacting," said David Hendon, a spokesman for 
the EU delegation.

"But I think it's a tactical overreaction for the negotiations," he added.

"We expected this proposal to move the summit along from the stalemate," 
Hendon said. "It is unreasonable to leave in the hands of the U.S. the 
power to decide what happens with the Internet in other countries."

Various groups, including the International Telecommunication Union, a 
UN agency based in Geneva, have suggested that the U.S. government has 
too much control over the Internet.

Under the terms of a 1998 memorandum of understanding, Icann was to gain 
its independence from the Commerce Department by September 2006.

But the Bush administration said in July that the United States would 
"maintain its historic role in authorizing changes or modifications to 
the authoritative root zone file." In so doing, the government "intends 
to preserve the security and stability" of the technical underpinnings 
of the Internet.

Without consensus, some experts say that countries might move ahead with 
setting up their own domain name system, or DNS, as a way of bypassing 
Icann.

The United States argues that a single addressing system is what makes 
the Internet so powerful, and moves to set up multiple Internets would 
be in no one's interest.

"It's not just working," said Michael Gallagher, an assistant secretary 
at the Commerce Department who heads communication policy. "It's working 
spectacularly." Paul Twomey, chief executive of Icann, said fears of 
U.S. government influence on the Internet were overstated.

Delegates say the conference has made much better progress on issues 
like dealing with spam e-mail messages and identity theft since it began 
in 2003. But they said they did not expect to be able to complete a 
document on Friday, as had been planned, and that further talks would be 
needed before the Tunisia meeting Nov. 16 to 18.


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  Francis F. Muguet  Ph.D
  MDPI  Open Access Journals -  Associate Publisher
  http://www.mdpi.org  muguet at mdpi.net

  Knowledge Networks & Information Society Lab. (KNIS)
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  Multi-Stakeholders UN agency proposal  http://www.unmsp.org

  WTIS World Tour of the Information Society
  http://www.wtis.org  muguet at wtis;org
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