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November 16, 2005
Internet Governance: Let's Call It a Draw
Government delegates managed to wrap up their drafting of the official documents to be agreed upon here at WSIS around 11pm last night. As to the big fight over Internet governance, it basically ended as a stalemate:
An expected fight over the governance of the internet looked to have been averted last night as a tentative deal was struck which would allow the US government to retain overall control of the medium for the foreseeable future. As delegates arrived for today's opening of the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in the Tunisian capital, bureaucrats who had been locked in three days of pre-summit meetings reckoned they had a compromise.The US government will retain overall control of the technology which powers the internet - its domain name system, root servers and the oversight of the California-based, not-for-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) which looks after it all - for the foreseeable future.
An Internet Governance Forum will be created to discuss and decide upon the over-reaching issues of the internet, but, crucially, will not have any oversight powers. Governments have also agreed to work within existing organisations and infrastructures to gradually transform the way the internet is run.
It is a far cry from the inter-governmental oversight body that was proposed by the European Union in September. That proposal, which shocked the US as much as it pleased Brazil, China and Iran, pushed the previously unnoticed issue of internet governance on to the world stage and turned the topic into the main focus of the WSIS.
No doubt most of the major players on both sides of the issue will probably issue press releases this morning declaring "victory." That's politics for you.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at November 16, 2005 9:20 AM
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