WSIS to Consider Internet Governance Under U.N.

penciling_in writes "The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) starting next week in Geneva is expected to attract more than 50 heads of state and 6,000 delegates who will address issues from the digital divide to Internet governance. It will be addressing the broad range of themes concerning the Information Society and adoption of a Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action, which reportedly includes a recommendation to place the governance of the Internet under the United Nations. In response to issues leading up to this event, CircleID has been running a number of articles including Karl Auerbach's piece, 'Will ICANN Reveal Its True Self To WSIS?' and an extensive Interview (Part I | Part II) by Geert Lovink with Milton Mueller, author of 'Ruling the Root', one of the first detailed investigations into the Internet domain name policies." There's a Reuters story on this conference.

Comments

Re:What crap.

[drinkypoo]

But in terms of the UN, not all nations are created (or in this case, represented) equally. It makes no particular sense to give control of the internet to the UN.

The US has the lion's share of control over the internet because it was invented here and momentum's a bitch. But, even the "enemies" of the USA have IP addresses, their own TLDs, et cetera. It really doesn't look like we're abusing our position as a nation. Oh sure ICANN and Verisign have been falling down on the job of providing a resource but that's just related to being private companies - do you really think it would be better if they were part of some government, even a supposed world government?

You're right, they should be in the hands of all of us. But I'm not convinced the UN should be in charge - of anything. To me, the UN is a forum.

The current system may be broken, but I don't see any reason the UN would fix it. I think they'd likely break it worse. If you want to broker change in the way we network, I suggest you start working on a replacement for the internet which is completely decentralized. That way, we don't need anyone to manage it for us. You will need some good strong cryptography so that we can verify identities, rather than depending on IP address allocation which can change overnight. Then of course we will get into web-of-trust issues, but that's still a more robust way to handle identity verification than in current models. Giving the UN control of the internet does not solve the root problem which no revision of IP can resolve - the requirement for central management. THAT is the real problem. The internet cannot be free no matter who is in charge, if anyone is in charge.