Developing nations bristle at U.S. control of Internet

By Anick Jesdanun
The Associated Press

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive

Key decisions on Internet issues, such as domain names and addresses, now reside in a private agency spun off from the U.S. government — and the United States wants to keep it that way.

But if countries do not think their concerns are adequately heard by the Internet's key decision-makers, a U.N. official warned yesterday, they may create conflicting national policies and even set up their own networks within their borders.

"The medium itself can be fragmented," said Sarbuland Khan, coordinator of the U.N. Task Force on Information and Communications Technologies. That "can make it difficult for the Internet to remain a free and interchangeable medium of exchange."

Another gnawing dispute is over developing-world demands that rich nations bankroll info-tech projects that can bridge the digital divide between rich and poor nations. The discussions over funding and governance, along with media freedom, have taken the spotlight away from the main objective of the summit — gathering support for a multitude of digital-divide projects.

Some 16,000 people signed up to attend, including more than 50 world leaders, mostly from developing countries.

Given the extent of the disagreements, the world's leaders likely will conclude this week's World Summit on the Information Society by essentially ducking the issue and directing U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to convene a working group.

That group, to include government, business and civic leaders, would be directed to come up with a proposal for the final phase of the summit, in Tunisia in 2005.

China, South Africa, India and Brazil — the main proponents of wresting control of the Internet from the United States — have offered only vague blueprints for an alternative. Advocates have called for creating a separate treaty-based U.N. agency for Internet governance modeled after the International Telecommunications Union, which organized this week's summit.

Yoshio Utsumi, the union's secretary-general, said yesterday that his agency would be capable of assuming the responsibility, "but it's up to members to decide. At this moment, there is no consensus."

On another issue before the gathering in this city where the World Wide Web was invented 13 years ago, the United States and other industrialized countries have resisted Senegal's calls for a separate pool of money to finance technology projects in poorer nations.

But delegates reached a compromise of sorts yesterday: Countries that want a fund can create one, while skeptics — including the United States, Japan and the European Union — agreed to a study next year. No funding commitments were announced.

The organization that developing nations seek to replace is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers which the U.S. government selected in 1998 to oversee the Internet's core addressing systems.

Differences over the organization have gotten so intense that on Friday, its Chief Executive Paul Twomey found himself escorted out of a meeting room where negotiators were discussing his organization's fate.

Although the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers still answers to the U.S. Commerce Department, Twomey said the organization has tried to represent global needs by opening offices abroad and having board members from other countries. Twomey is Australian.

But the organization still is largely seen as a U.S. body.

Hans Klein, chairman of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, said governments are legitimately worried that the U.S. government can suddenly impose policies contrary to their interests. For instance, Klein said, the United States might remove from central databases the domain names for countries deemed sponsors of terrorism, essentially kicking them offline.

Developing countries also have been frustrated that Western countries that got on the Internet first gobbled up most of the available addresses required for computers to connect, leaving developing nations to share a limited supply.

And some countries want faster approval of domain names in non-English characters — China even threatened a few years ago to split the Internet in two and set up its own naming system for Chinese.

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company