EU and U.S. clash over control of Net

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EU and U.S. clash over control of Net

Tom Wright – International Herald Tribune

September 30, 2005

GENEVA The United States and Europe clashed here Thursday in one of their sharpest public disagreements in months, after European Union negotiators proposed stripping the Americans of their effective control of the Internet.

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"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."

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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.

Political unease with the U.S. approach, symbolized by opposition to the war in Iraq, has spilled over into these technical discussions, delegates said. The EU and developing nations, they added, wanted to send a signal to America that it could not run things alone. Opposition to Washington's continued dominance of the Internet was illustrated by a statement released last week by the Brazilian delegation to the talks. "On Internet governance, three words tend to come to mind: lack of legitimacy. In our digital world, only one nation decides for all of us."

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 role of governments in the new cooperation model should be mainly focused on principle issues of public policy, excluding any involvement in the day-to-day operations," the proposal said. The new model "should not replace existing mechanisms or institutions," it added. The proposal was vague but left open the possibility, fiercely opposed by Washington, that the United Nations itself could have some future governing role.

The United States has sharply criticized demands, like one made last week by Iran, for a UN body to govern the Internet, Gross said. "No intergovernmental body should control the Internet," he said, "whether it's the UN or any other." U.S. officials argue that a system like the one proposed by the EU would lead to unwanted bureaucratization of the Internet.

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