March 26, 2004, 14:45
Who runs the Internet and how can it better serve the world? Everyone from the Internet's founders to advocacy groups met at the United Nations to work on a new definition of governing the Internet.
While tech-savvy citizens of the developed world can send e-mail around the globe or buy digital music online, several governments in the developing world say the Internet has aggravated a "digital divide" where the world's poor remain unconnected to modern Internet and communication innovations.
"Already we can tell that there is an elephant in the room," Vinton Cerf, a director of the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said at a news briefing yesterday.
ICANN was chartered in 1998 by the US government as a private nonprofit body to assign names and numbers to manage domain names. "Some people suggest it is globalization. The other aspect of the elephant was that there were a lot of blind people trying to figure out what Internet governance is," said Cerf, a vice president of MCI. "So far, we've had many different views and no good definitions."
Internet is a booming industry
Internet use has exploded over the past decade, with an estimated 700 million and 1 billion users. Many developing countries want governments to play a larger role in what appears on the Internet through the International Telecommunications Union, a UN agency. However, the world's richer nations want to preserve the status quo. Some in the private sector fear increased government involvement could slow innovation and lead to more red tape.
A UN task force was established last December to determine whether government officials should step in and set Internet policy in an effort to speed up the bridging of the technology gap. At the two-day "Global Forum on Internet Governance" hosted by the United Nations, more than 200 representatives from government, the private sector and civil society debated issues such as regulation and transparency, and how to balance those with innovation in expanding the uses of the Internet.
Robert Kahn, a founder of the Internet who is CEO of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, said: "It takes a while to realize that it's like the world economy, really. There's nobody who runs it (the Internet) but a collaborative effect of a lot of people."
Anriette Esterhuysen of the South Africa-based Association for Progressive Communications said discussing Internet governance at a global forum "is going to bring us a lot closer to a workable system." The forum, which ends on Friday, will produce a report for the United Nations Information and Communication Technology Task Force. Their findings and recommendations will be presented at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis next year. - Reuters
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