Submitted by admin on Fri, 2005-11-25 09:00. ::
Home › Opinion › Editorials Keep U.N.'s mitts off the Internet Internet doesn't need oversight STORY TOOLS Email this story Print November 25, 2005 They came, they saw, they coveted. But since delegates to last week's World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia couldn't agree on how to wrest control of the Internet from a U.S.- based private group, they put off further discussion until next year.
That's not the worst possible outcome; before the summit, there were calls to dismantle ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and turn its functions over to the United Nations. ICANN is a private, non-profit organization established in 1998 to oversee the management of top-level domain names, the dot-suffixes like ".edu" and ".net" as well as country codes from .ac (for Ascension Island) to .zw (for Zimbabwe).
Some of the countries urging U.N. control perhaps sincerely believe international oversight is appropriate for anything as worldwide as the Web, or are genuinely worried that at some point the U.S. government could mismanage or sabotage the Internet in pursuit of its foreign-policy aims. But others undeniably have less honorable motives, especially countries that fear the revolutionary power of unfettered communication and want to maintain rigid limits on what their citizens are allowed to read or to say.
Letting such nations have any say over the Internet would be a disastrously bad idea, as preposterous as making Sudan a member of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.
Government in the United States isn't entirely immune to the impulse to meddle with domain names. The Department of Commerce weighed in on an application to approve a new top level domain, .xxx for sex-related sites, asking for more time for public comment - but it asked; it had no power to command. And American law and social institutions provide better protection against government overreach than weak and ineffectual international structures.
Unfortunately, the threat of international oversight is only postponed, not eliminated by the summit's decision. Talking-shops sometimes acquire actual power, and they do have influence. ICANN professes itself pleased, but it is clearly worried about the possibility of government interference, and not from Washington, D.C.
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