[WSIS CS-Plenary] Herald Tribune: "UN takeover of Internet? Some are 'not amused' "

[Hans Klein]

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UN takeover of Internet? Some are 'not amused'
Jennifer L. Schenker/IHT
Monday, December 8, 2003



PARIS Paul Twomey, the president of the Internet Corporation for Assigned 
Names and Numbers, found out what it feels like to be voiceless.

On Friday night, Twomey, who flew 20 hours to Geneva from a meeting in 
Vietnam to take part in a preparatory session for this week's United 
Nations summit meeting on Internet issues, was escorted to the exit of the 
meeting room by guards after participants suddenly decided to exclude 
observers.

The move underscores the wrath of countries that for years have been 
unhappy with what they perceive as their voicelessness over how the 
Internet is run and over U.S. ownership of key Internet resources. It also 
foretells the level of criticism that both the U.S. government and the 
Internet Corporation, or Icann, may face at the UN meeting, one of the 
largest gatherings ever of high-level government officials, business 
leaders and nonprofit organizations to discuss the Internet's future.

Formal meeting activities begin on Wednesday. Although more than 60 nations 
will be represented in Geneva by their heads of government, only a handful 
of industrial nations are sending their leaders. President George W. Bush 
has no plans to attend, though the U.S. government will be represented by 
other officials.

To the great frustration of the international community, Icann, a private 
company under contract to the U.S. government to oversee the technical 
aspects of the Internet's address system, has been in a pole position of 
power since its formation in 1998, deciding such issues as when languages 
could be used as a communication tool by other nations.

Twomey, reached by mobile phone outside the conference room, said: "At 
Icann, anybody can attend meetings, appeal decisions or go to ombudsmen, 
and here I am outside a UN meeting room where diplomats - most of whom know 
little about the technical aspects - are deciding in a closed forum how 750 
million people should reach the Internet. I am not amused."

Twomey said he, representatives of the news media and anyone who was not a 
government official had been evicted from the meeting.

During the UN gathering, an expected 5,000 representatives from 
intragovernmental, business and nonprofit organizations will try to devise 
an action plan for the next phase of the Internet, addressing issues like 
how to close the digital divide, supervise the Internet and deal with 
problems like spam and pornography on the Web.

A principal point of debate will be whether the Internet should be overseen 
by the United Nations instead of American groups like Icann.

Since the Internet first took root in the United States, American interests 
had been given priority. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology still has more Internet addresses than all of China, according 
to Lee McKnight, an associate professor at Syracuse University in New York 
and an MIT research affiliate. By 2007, though, more than 50 percent of Web 
users will be Chinese, according to some forecasts.

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, a Jordanian businessman who is vice chairman of the UN 
Information and Communication Technology Task Force, said that "the world 
should be grateful to Uncle Sam for creating the Internet" but that it was 
time for the rest of the world to have a larger voice in its governance. 
Abu-Ghazaleh said he planned to present his own proposal for a new, more 
international management of Icann at a private meeting on Tuesday.

To that end, all countries participating in the UN gathering agreed Sunday 
that a working group should be set up under the auspices of the United 
Nations to examine Internet governance issues, including the question of 
whether more formal oversight of Icann by governments or intragovernmental 
agencies is necessary, said Marcus Kummer, the Swiss Foreign Ministry's 
delegate and head of the UN meeting's working group on Internet governance.

Tuesday's private meeting will bring together heads of state from six 
African, five Middle Eastern, four European and two Asian countries as well 
as the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, and Erkki Liikanen, the European 
Union's commissioner for enterprise and information society. Conspicuously 
absent from the list of invitees in the private meeting are Icann and the 
U.S. government, which has sent a delegation of 41 people to the Geneva 
meeting.

High-profile Internet figures, including Nicholas Negroponte, Esther Dyson 
and Tim Berners-Lee, are expected to attend Tuesday's private meeting, as 
are senior executives from a variety of multinational companies, including 
America Online, Microsoft, Boeing, Siemens, Alcatel, Vodafone and the 
company that Abu-Ghazaleh heads, a Cairo-based services company called the 
Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Organization.

The meeting will address four topics: Internet governance, the use of 
excess bandwidth to help development, connecting more people to 
communications networks and finding the appropriate technologies. At the 
heart of each of the four discussions will be the question of what role 
government and intragovernmental agencies should play.

"The U.S. government position," a U.S. State Department spokesman said last 
week, "is that the Internet is coordinated and led by the private sector 
and should be private-sector-led."

But he said the U.S. government was committed to insuring a balanced voice 
for the international community.

But many countries do not agree with the argument that the United States 
has no control or that Icann adequately represents the Internet's global 
interests. The U.S. government gave a two-year contract to Icann in 1998 
and was supposed to withdraw its support when the contract expired. But the 
government has not done so.

Abu-Ghazaleh plans to propose, at the private meeting, that Icann be placed 
under the umbrella of the UN communications task force, which gives equal 
status to government, private sector and nongovernmental organizations.

Under his plan, the United States would have permanent presidency of an 
Icann oversight committee. The International Telecommunication Union, a UN 
agency, and the International Chamber of Commerce would also have permanent 
membership, as would the World Intellectual Property Organization and the 
UN Conference on Trade and Development.

Each of the world's five continents would have one elected representative 
on the committee, elected by the countries from the continent they 
represent. Icann itself would continue to be based in the United States, 
governed by U.S. law, and the same people who no carry out the technical 
work would continue to do so. Twomey, the president of Icann, said he saw 
no reason to change the current setup, pointing out that nearly 100 
governments were already represented on Icann's advisory committee. He said 
Icann planned to open regional offices in Europe, Africa, Latin America and 
Asia in 2004.

He pointed to progress recently made on allowing languages and characters 
other than Roman to be used for Internet addresses. Since October, 
countries have been able to register domain names using Chinese (both 
simplified and traditional), Japanese and Korean, with Vietnamese and 
others to follow soon.

Twomey emphasized that Icann's role was limited to addressing.

"If governments think they can really find a place to discuss spam and 
child porn and e-commerce, we would probably welcome it," he said. "These 
things are not in our charter - it is not what we do. So we want to assure 
everyone involved that we are not standing in the way."

But when it comes to the technical underpinnings of the Internet, Twomey 
said, Icann should be allowed to continue its work.

"It is not broken, so why fix it?" he asked.

International Herald Tribune

  Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune