The Internet: Brought to You By Iran, Syria and China

Steven Forrest, free2innovate.net:

Perhaps only the French could come up with a plan for Internet governance that is absurd that we look to ICANN as the voice of reason. At this week’s WSIS meetings in Geneva, France pushed the European Union to propose a new Internet Governance plan. If adopted, the EU's proposal - which calls for a government-run body to control the Internet - would mean the end of ICANN and business-led Internet policies, and hand over the future of the Internet to countries such as Iran, Syria and China. READ MORE

Why? Because the Internet has been too successful operating on its own for the last decade. A billion users, over a trillion dollars in commerce and communications. It’s time for the United Nations to take control because they can run it better.

And they have already telegraphed at the Geneva meetings how they would operate:

Business groups were expelled at the insistence of the Chinese delegation from cyber security meetings.

Business groups were expelled at the insistence of the Egyptian delegation from a drafting group on the "enabling environment."

Business groups were expelled at the insistence of the Iranian delegation from a drafting group on privacy and consumer protection.

Keep in mind that just last week that China tightened its restrictions on Internet news.

Make no mistake, this bid is about control of the Internet, its operations and its content - and it's horrible news for anyone who wants to see the Internet flourish as an engine of technological innovation, economic growth and the free exchange of ideas and information.

The U.S. Government has signaled it will stand by the current system of a business-government partnership to determine the best policies for the Internet.

ICANN may have its faults - indeed, I have documented some of its flaws on this site - but right now it looks pretty good compared to what the EU and "Axis of Bureaucracy" are dreaming up for the future of the Internet.

The Associated Press story focuses only on the U.S. government's position, and doesn't provide details of the alternative. The International Herald Tribune's story is significantly better - and notes that the EU's proposal includes handing control of the Internet's addressing system, the Domain Name System, to the UN-run body.

The United States lost its only ally late Wednesday when the EU made a surprise proposal to create an intergovernmental body that would set principles for running the Internet. Currently, the U.S. Commerce Department approves changes to the Internet's "root zone files," which are administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, a nonprofit organization based in Marina del Rey, California.

In its new proposal, the EU said the new body could set guidelines on who gets control of what Internet address - the main mechanism for finding information across the global network - and could play a role in helping to set up a system for resolving disputes

The IHT says the European decision to support the creation of a new international body to govern the Internet "clearly caught the Americans off balance and left them largely isolated at talks designed to come up with a new way of regulating the digital traffic of the 21st century."

"It's a very shocking and profound change of the EU's position," said David Gross, the State Department official in charge of America's international communications policy. "The EU's proposal seems to represent an historic shift in the regulatory approach to the Internet from one that is based on private sector leadership to a government, top-down control of the Internet."

Delegates meeting in Geneva for the past two weeks had been hoping to reach consensus for a draft document by Friday after two years of debate. The talks on international digital issues, called the World Summit on the Information Society and organized by the United Nations, were scheduled to conclude in November at a meeting in Tunisia. Instead, the talks have deadlocked, with the United States fighting a solitary battle against countries that want to see a global body take over supervision of the Internet.

It's a battle that the United States must win - or else, a decade from now, we'll be asking "Who lost the Internet?"