Friday, September 30, 2005
Who Will Control the Network? EU vs. US Public vs. Private?
EU Tries to Unblock Internet Impasse - New York Times
In an important political shift the U.S. has lost an important ally in the conflict over who will control the internet. The European Union (EU) is supporting the creation of an international organization that will oversee the basic functions of the Internet:
American dominance over the internet has been a source of frustration which has only grown with the increasing anti-American sentiment generated by recent American foreign policy. Much of the opposition is coming from the developing world, but the U.S. had been able to count the EU as an ally until now. This shift in EU policy signals a clear turning point for US information policy. This opposition to U.S. dominance reflects a fear of the unilateral policies of the world's one remaining superpower. The Bush administration will be forced to confront an increasingly vocal global coalition for international control of the world information infrastructure. These developments are a reaction to President's Bush's announcement in July reasserting American control over ICANN. His position is that the U.S. must
The New York Times article quotes the Brazilian delegation to the UN World Summit on the Information Society statement opposing U.S. control over the Internet:
See also the International Telecommunication's Union Summit on the World Information Society Web Site, especially the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG)page.
In an important political shift the U.S. has lost an important ally in the conflict over who will control the internet. The European Union (EU) is supporting the creation of an international organization that will oversee the basic functions of the Internet:
"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.
American dominance over the internet has been a source of frustration which has only grown with the increasing anti-American sentiment generated by recent American foreign policy. Much of the opposition is coming from the developing world, but the U.S. had been able to count the EU as an ally until now. This shift in EU policy signals a clear turning point for US information policy. This opposition to U.S. dominance reflects a fear of the unilateral policies of the world's one remaining superpower. The Bush administration will be forced to confront an increasingly vocal global coalition for international control of the world information infrastructure. These developments are a reaction to President's Bush's announcement in July reasserting American control over ICANN. His position is that the U.S. must
"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.The Bush administrations seems to be making the argument that an international bureaucracy controlled by the UN or any other international body will prevent the efficient development of the internet to meet global demand. Centralized control by a private organization dominated by the U.S. government making decisions for the whole world is the status quo that the Bush administration is seeking to protect. The EU does not seem to have the same fear of international government that American conservatives express in opposition to any increased role of the UN in overseeing the global network.
The New York Times article quotes the Brazilian delegation to the UN World Summit on the Information Society statement opposing U.S. control over the Internet:
"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."The Times also raises the spectre of the splitting of the world wide web into competing systems controlled by different organizations assigning their own domain names and protocols which would effectively end the smooth transfer of information between networks and effectively create a balkanized web of hostile walled gardens that would end the utopian dream of an informational global village. A Christian Science Monitor article opposing UN control raises the same point:
If international demands for less US control boil over, other countries could employ a "nuclear option" - setting up a rival to ICANN and potentially creating chaos on the Internet with two divergent standards.
See also the International Telecommunication's Union Summit on the World Information Society Web Site, especially the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG)page.
