The European Union is asking that the U.S. cede control of the Internet over to an international body. Citing that the Internet is being used by millions world wide, the EU feels that this would be a fair approach to the issue of who has control of the net. In a recent article at the Silicon Valley web site of The Mercury News it also states that:
An agreement that gave the U.S. Commerce Department control over the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, expires Sept. 30. The nonprofit company was created in 1998 to oversee computer servers that manage databases of domain names, which are suffixes of Web sites such as “.com.”
“It is not defendable that the government department of only one country has oversight of an Internet function which is used by hundreds of millions of people in countries all over the world,” Reding said Monday in Brussels.
The 27-member European Union has called on the U.S. government to ensure more transparency in how the Internet is run. Reding said ICANN should be fully privatized when the agreement expires. An advisory panel to ICANN said in a February report the U.S. should consider establishing an organization independent of the government to oversee the Internet.
“We hope all stakeholders will share their views in this proceeding, as we believe that ICANN can only succeed if it enjoys the confidence of the community it serves,” Mark Tolbert, a U.S. Commerce Department spokesman, said in an e-mail.
The U.S. has come under pressure from other nations to adapt Internet governance as countries seek to manage their domain names, such as .fr, .uk and. eu. Nations have also said the current structure creates security issues, particularly after Estonia’s Web sites were attacked by hackers in May 2007 amid a diplomatic clash with Russia over a war memorial.
I personally believe that this is a great idea to share the burden of controlling the Internet. At the same time we should get the EU to house the United Nations as well. The U.S. has gotten stuck with that bill and its time to share the joy.
Comments welcome.
Well, the US wants to control ICANN and the UN, and in this way the government can exert undue influence over both.
Internationalizing ICANN would remove the possibility for the kind of abuse that happened when the US government removed the domain registry entry for Wikileaks when it posted information that embarrassed the United States.
The UN issue by the way….I think the UN should be disbanded in it’s current form as it has obviously failed in it’s mandate to enforce the peace.
Bush highlighted that when he railroaded his illegal war of aggression and bypassed the UN completely.
Had the UN thoroughly been allowed to investigate the Iraq issue and enforce a binding resolution ordering the cessation of American hostilities, then it would have been made clear that Iraq had no WMDs without the seeming need of the warmongering Republicans to get over 5,000 American soldiers and untold thousands of Iraqi civilians killed.
The veto power on the UNSC given to the 5 permanent members ensured that the UN would fail to become anything more than a bureaucracy.
There’s also nothing ordering the United States to pay reparations for the war crimes. It’s an outrage.
There were over 18 UN resolutions against Iraq. Saddam basicly said, f–k you, and kicked the inspectors out of the country. When was the UN going to investigate? They hadn’t done any in the years leading up to the US invasion. Did you know that during Clintons 8 years that well over 4000 service men and women lost their lives? War crimes? Are you serious!? Yeah, when has anyone been forced by the UN to pay?
We should kick the UN out and if the EU wants to control the net, what do we get?
” At the same time we should get the EU to house the United Nations as well. The U.S. has gotten stuck with that bill and its time to share the joy.”
You need to do some serious fact checking. When was the last time that the US was not in arrears with it dues?
I find it interesting that with the amount of money we spend bombing the bogeymen that our government cooks up, we could probably feed, clothe, and educate every child in those countries with money left over to spare.
It would sure go a lot further towards winning friends and influencing people.
Anyhow, the European Union should place sanctions on the United States until such time that ICANN is transferred over to an international body.
We couldn’t stand for long if the countries we take advantage of regularly all turned their backs to us.
It would be a nightmare for all these anti-free speech organizations if they had to work over a dozen countries that control the internet, instead of just one.
If it was under the control of an international committee, than if a place got an order to remove the listing for say Wikileaks, that would only mean that our representative had to vote to do it, not that they immediately got to censor whatever they liked by getting a ruling in a US court.
So that’s why I say give control to an international committee, it makes the internet more resilient to the bidding of anti-free speech organizations in one particular country.
I think that the current arrangement works pretty well. I don’t see any benifit for setting up a multinational goveranance board. The mostly hands off approach that the Commerce Dept takes combined with the ICANN stakeholders include individuals and buisnesses in their decision making process is almost perfect. Look at the Human Rights Council and how it’s mainly a anti-Israel forum. UN agencies tend to ignore their mandates.