Who Will Control the Internet - Washington Battles the World
![handle is hein.journals/fora84 and id is 973 raw text is:
Who Will Control the Internet?
Washington Battles the World
Kenneth Neil Cukier
As historic documents go, the statement
issued by the U.S. Department of Com-
merce on June 30 was low-key even by
American standards of informality. No
flowery language, no fountain-penned
signatures, no Great Seal of the United
States-only 331 words on a single page.
But the simplicity of the presentation be-
lied the importance of the content, which
was Washington's attempt to settle a crucial
problem of twenty-first-century global
governance: Who controls the Internet?
Any network requires some centralized
control in order to function. The global
phone system, for example, is administered
by the world's oldest international treaty
organization, the International Telecom-
munication Union, founded in 1865 and
now a part of the UN family. The Internet
is different. It is coordinated by a private-
sector nonprofit organization called the
Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names and Numbers (ICANN), which
was set up by the United States in 1998
to take over the activities performed for
30 years, amazingly, by a single pony-
tailed professor in California.
The controversy over who controls
the Internet has simmered in insular
technology-policy circles for years and
more recently has crept into formal
diplomatic talks. Many governments feel
that, like the phone network, the Internet
should be administered under a multilateral
treaty. ICANN, in their view, is an instrument
of American hegemony over cyberspace: its
private-sector approach favors the United
States, Washington retains oversight au-
thority, and its Governmental Advisory
Committee, composed of delegates from
other nations, has no real powers.
This discontent finally boiled over at
the UN'S World Summit on the Informa-
tion Society, the first phase of which was
held in Geneva in December 2003 (the
second phase is set for November in Tunis).
Brazil and South Africa have criticized
the current arrangement, and China has
called for the creation of a new interna-
tional treaty organization. France wants
an intergovernmental approach, but one
involving only an elite group of democratic
nations. Cuba and Syria have taken advan-
tage of the controversy to poke a finger in
17]
KENNETH NEIL CUKIER covers technology and regulatory issues for
The Economist.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/fora84&div=98&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
What Is HeinOnline?
Contact us for annual subscription options:
Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?
profiles profiles most
Who Will Control the Internet - Washington Battles the World
Contact us for annual subscription options:
Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?
profiles profiles most