Governing the Internet Report Released

An anonymous reader writes "After the speculation on earlier this week, the Working Group of Internet Governance (aka the United Nations attempt to govern the Internet) has just released their much anticipated report. News coverage and a helpful summary point to the four options on the table and the likely outcome in the months leading up to a final conference in Tunisia in November."

Comments

Give control to the ISPs

[91degrees]

They have effective control anyway. If they all decided to point their DNS servers to a certain place, then that would be adefacto domain name registry. I'm sure the same applies to IP addresses.

Sort out some fair means of representation, and get them to select a root administrator. They all have the same ultimate goal - a stable internet - and they al understand the internet. The same cannot be said of the US government or the UN.

Nationalized, Fractured Internet?

[Jerle0]

3. Creation of International Internet Council that would assume responsibility for the Internet governance issues that arise on the national level. ICANN's mandate would need to be altered based on the development of the IIC.

All of the negatives aside, one thing I like about ICAAN is there is one point that everything leads back to. If control over the internet is split among various nations, it seems it would be too easy for the pieces of the internet to become segmented if the nations involved ever had a dispute over something. That might give countries like China, who already do strange thigns with the internet, the possibility of completely cutting themselves off from the rest of the world.

Re:Hmmmm

[fuzzybunny]

Define "control".

It's not so simple as "US vs. rest of world"--it's a balance between "how much do you trust the US to be a fair custodian" vs. "how much do you trust an organization giving weight to what Libya and South Africa and Papua New Guinea want to be a fair custodian".

As far as I'm concerned, having an organization in the US, with some involvement by the US government, "running" things is not a great solution but a lot less worse than, say, whatever the ITU would come up with.

That said, remember that the Internet works on the principle of routing around failure. Neither the UN nor ICANN nor the US government are known as organizations which always work quickly, logically, unbureaucratically and in the best interests of both their constituents and the greater community at large.

The "US", aside from a few fun Internic fuckups in the 1990s, didn't ever "turn off the Internet" or come up with idiotic international requirements. Carnivore? Try enforcing that in France. Nobody's stopping me from using encryption between Ghana and Mongolia. I wouldn't, however, put it past some atechnical third world level 50 career bureaucrat to come up with something stupid wthich might try to do just that.

Not that it'll ever work, but it'll just create more work for everyone. Another thing I'd like to see pro-UN-control folks to ask themselves honestly would be "is this just a pure control question"? I hate to say it, but like Magellan, anyone can always build their own...