[IP] U.N. Agrees to Examine How Internet Is Governed
U.N. Agrees to Examine How Internet Is Governed
December 15, 2003
By JENNIFER L. SCHENKER
International Herald Tribune
GENEVA, Dec. 13 - For the United States and some other
industrial nations, the most significant development at the
United Nations conference on the Internet may have been
what did not happen.
In the four-day conference, which ended Friday, the
industrialized powers had feared that developing nations
would vote for the United Nations to take administrative
control of the Internet and call for a new pool of money to
help poorer countries go online - money that industrial
nations presumably would be expected to provide.
Instead, the delegates agreed that a United Nations working
group should be set up to examine whether to introduce more
international oversight of the Internet's semiformal
administrative bodies. Those bodies include Icann, the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a
company under contract to the United States Commerce
Department that coordinates Internet addresses and some
other technical issues.
Another United Nations committee will be set up to review
ways of paying for efforts to connect the world's poor to
the Internet.
Industrialized countries pushed for and won an endorsement
of intellectual property rights as well as human rights and
media freedom.
The leader of the United States' delegation, David Gross,
said the conference outcome meant that private sector
interests would not lose their stake in how the Internet is
governed, although they would have to make more room at the
table for other stakeholders. "We are still listening, very
carefully, about how that might be done," Mr. Gross said.
The United States nonetheless took its lumps at the
conference.
"Even if it is not true, there is a perception that the
U.S. government is running the Internet," said Eli M. Noam,
who is the head of the Institute for Tele-Information at
Columbia University and was a session moderator at the
conference.
Many public comments were similar to those expressed by
Shashi Tharoor, the United Nations under secretary general
for information and communications, who said in an
interview, "Unlike the French Revolution, the Internet
revolution has lots of liberty, some fraternity and no
equality."
According to the International Telecommunications Union,
the United Nations agency that organized the conference,
only 1 percent of people in the world's poorest countries
are connected to the Internet. To illustrate the gap
between rich and poor countries, the agency noted that the
450,000 residents of Luxembourg have more Internet capacity
than Africa's 760 million people.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/15/technology/15divide.html?ex=1072482369&ei=1&en=35d3f8f29baed7fd
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