No Agreement on Internet Governance
Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, (IPS) - The script for the final act of the World Summit for the Information Society (WSIS) will begin to be written on Sep. 19 in this Swiss city, with the participation of a cast that will be made up - for the first time on the international stage - of a wide range of actors: governments, business and civil society.
Stemming from its novel makeup are discrepancies that have stood in the way of the drafting of a text that everyone can agree on, which is to be signed by the heads of state and government at the second phase of the WSIS, to be held Nov. 14-16 in Tunisia.
The WSIS, the first phase of which took place in Geneva in December 2003, revolves around the challenges posed by the information society with respect to the future of the Internet, especially the gap between rich and poor countries in the use of computer and telecommunications technologies.
The business community and some governments, especially the George W. Bush administration in the United States, want to maintain the current Internet governance regime, which so far has been almost exclusively in the hands of the private sector and the U.S. government.
Industry, which controls - and profits from - the current system, wants to leave it as it is, a position shared by the United States, said Brazilian representative José Marcos Nogueira Viana.
The great majority of developing countries, on the other hand, are pushing for reforms of Internet governance, as are civil society organisations, although they differ with the proposed models for reform.
The issue of Internet governance will be the focus of the last Preparatory Committee Meeting, scheduled for Sep. 19-30 in Geneva.
Since its creation in the 1960s, the worldwide web has been growing by leaps and bounds, and currently connects some one billion users around the globe.
The question of Internet governance also includes aspects like the mechanisms to be established to follow up on compliance with the resolutions reached in the two phases of the WSIS, in Geneva and Tunis.
The Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) set up by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan noted in its final report in July that defining Internet governance "has been the subject of long discussions."
It therefore provided the following definition: "Internet governance is the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet."
The report made a significant clarification by limiting the actions of the three sectors - governments, business and civil society - to "their respective roles."
That concept, which is supported by the great majority of governments, would apparently place limits on this first experiment in holding a truly tripartite U.N. conference.
Civil society groups have protested that the specific roles granted to non-governmental organisations and the private sector are ambiguous in relation to the role assigned to governments.
Referring to civil society and business, Viana said the governments were not opposed to "observers," while adding, however, that there are times when it is governments that must make the decisions.
He pointed out that Brazil and the United States hold public hearings, but afterwards it is the governments that decide by decree or by law.
Viana also noted that the digital gap has two facets: financial inequalities, which make it difficult to attain Internet connection and purchase computers in poor countries; and political inequalities, arising from the inability of developing countries to influence decision-making with regard to the Internet.
In the first phase of the WSIS, participants decided to study the possibility of obtaining resources to finance the expansion of information and communications technologies in developing countries.
But the U.S. and Japanese representatives said there were no funds for that, said Viana.
The only option for financing emerged from an initiative put forth by the president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, which was taken up by municipal authorities in a number of cities, led by Lyon and Geneva, to create a "digital solidarity fund".
Viana noted, however, that the fund is an initiative to help cities, while at a global level there is nothing, because donor nations are not interested.
Another aspect of the controversy focuses on the power exercised by the private sector and the U.S. government in Internet governance.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a U.S.-based private not-for-profit body, is exclusively responsible for assigning Internet names and addresses, such as domain names like .net, .edu or .com.
The WGIG stated that "No single government should have a pre-eminent role in relation to international Internet governance."
But Michael Gallagher, assistant secretary at the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration, recently indicated that his government was not ready to give up the control it exercises.
The bloc of civil society organisations active in the WSIS expressed concern over Gallagher's statement, saying it "raised a number of questions" and implied that unilateral U.S. control would be maintained indefinitely.
Brazil, one of the countries that has been most active in calling for the democratisation of Internet governance, said the incident involving the creation of a top-level domain name for pornography websites had demonstrated U.S. power over the Internet.
Two months ago, ICANN officials approved the concept of the .xxx domain name.
Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and the chairman of the ICANN board, said everything was ready for registering the domain name and that the only concerns were technical ones.
The Brazilian representatives argued that creating the .xxx domain name would pave the way for accepting the registration of others like .nazi, while the delegates from Spain said it would be like approving a domain name like .odio (.hate).
"ICANN has the tendency to adopt political decisions under the guise of technical criteria," said Viana.
ICANN only postponed the creation of the .xxx domain until Sep. 19 because the U.S. government sent a letter stating that it had received protests from church groups in the United States, said the Brazilian representative.
"That proves that there is a government that controls the entire system," he maintained.
ipsnews.net
A World Wide Web of Oppression
Steven J. DuBord
Any plan for an Internet effectively controlled by the United Nations will serve only to blanket the globe in a world wide web of oppression.
A United Nations-appointed panel has done it again. Or not done it again, depending on your perspective. What did they do? They convened purportedly on behalf of the best interests of every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth — this time regarding the fate of the Internet — though they were not elected to this task by any of the billions they supposedly represent. What didn't they do? Agree, thank goodness.
There are few things worse than unelected, unaccountable "representatives" actually agreeing on what they think is best for the world and leaving the world no say in the matter. Come to think of it, these people do represent someone; they were nominated by the UN secretary-general. The fact that he is knee-deep in the UN's oil-for-food scandal — one of the biggest humanitarian aid swindles in history — just might shake our confidence in his hand-picked team.
Reuters reported on July 14 that this panel, the Working Group on Internet Governance, was unable to reach an agreement on who should manage the Internet and how the job should be done. They did, though, come up with four models for overseeing the Internet that ranged from maintaining the status quo of U.S. management with private sector involvement to putting the assignment of all Internet domains under the auspices of the UN. Reuters stated: "At issue for the world body is who runs the Internet and how it can better serve the world."
To "better serve the world" … hmm, shades of the old Twilight Zone episode in which aliens visited Earth and brought with them a book reassuringly titled To Serve Man . It turned out that the aliens were taking humans back to their home planet on a one-way trip because … (spoiler alert) To Serve Man was a cookbook. As this publication has previously noted ("Make Way for the UNternet?" on January 26, 2004, and "UN to Make Internet a Global 'Common Heritage'?" on March 21, 2005), the United Nations has long desired to "serve" the world by running the Internet.
Yet the UN's real stake in the issue is not how the Internet can better serve the world, but how it can better serve world government. For an Internet effectively controlled by the UN is an Internet effectively controlled by government. That the UN-appointed panel was called the Working Group on Internet Governance gives this away. To see what an Internet effectively controlled by government looks like, one need look no further than to a permanent member in good standing of the UN Security Council, Communist China.
Through both technology and regulation, Communist China has severely limited access to the Internet from within its borders, creating what has been called the Great Fire Wall of China. Yet the building of this Great Fire Wall has not disqualified China from membership in the highest ranks of the United Nations. How will it serve the world to turn over the Internet to a body that tolerates such tyranny?
Communist China's totalitarian Internet policies are the most repressive in the world. The Open Net Initiative, a joint effort by the University of Toronto, Harvard University, and the University of Cambridge, recognized this in their 2004-2005 study on Internet filtering in China. Beijing "operates the most extensive, technologically sophisticated, and broad-reaching system of Internet filtering in the world." Anyone who opens an Internet account in China must register it with the police. Chinese Internet Service Providers are required to track their customers' usage and websites visited. Cyber cafés offering public Internet access "must keep detailed logs linking users to the pages they visited." The Open Net Initiative study points out that "China's intricate technical filtering regime is buttressed by an equally complex series of laws and regulations that control the access to and publication of material online."
U.S. firms desiring to do business in Communist China must bow to these repressive regulations and to Beijing's lust for absolute control over its subjects. French news agency AFP reported on June 13 that Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google have all agreed to cooperate in censoring the Internet from their China-based sites by filtering out content that the Chinese government finds objectionable. The list of forbidden words includes "democracy," "freedom," "human rights," and "Taiwan independence." AFP also noted that any China-based websites not formally registered with the government by the end of June 2005 would be shut down by the government's Internet police.
Article 29 of the UN's Universal Declaration on Human Rights states that "in the exercise of their rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law.... These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations." Since the UN views rights as being given by government, not granted by God, there is apparently no incompatibility between the Communist Chinese policies — which are, after all, "determined by law" — and the "principles of the United Nations."
Any plan for an Internet effectively controlled by the United Nations will serve only to blanket the globe in a world wide web of oppression.
thenewamerican.com
UN to Make Internet a Global 'Common Heritage'?
William Norman Grigg
This November, the UN will convene a "World Summit on the Information Society" in Tunis. In Tunisia, reported a February 21 Reuters dispatch, "global control of the world wide web may be decided."
At present, “the most recognizable Internet governance body is a California-based non-profit company, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN),” continued the report. “But developing countries want an international body, such as the UN's International Telecommunications Union (ITU), to have control over governance — from distributing Web site domains to fighting spam.” According to Nitin Desai, chairman of a UN working group on the Internet created in December 2003, “There is an issue that is out there that needs to be resolved.”
The draft “Declaration of Principles” for the Tunis Summit calls for the creation of “a people-centered, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society … premised on the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations....” Under that vision, the Internet — rather than being a market-oriented entity controlled by no political body — would be used “to promote the development goals of the Millennium Declaration,” particularly “the right to development, as enshrined in the Vienna Declaration....” That “right” refers to the desire of the UN to redistribute wealth and technology from the U.S. and other prosperous nations to the kleptocratic governments of the “developing world.”
Furthermore, the draft declaration pointedly invokes “Article 29 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” which states that “everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of their personality is possible, and that, in the exercise of their rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law.... These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.” In plainer language, the UN seeks the power to suppress any use of the Internet and other information technology to criticize the world body or impede its designs for global governance.
The UN's proposed Law of the Sea Treaty would designate the oceans a UN-administered “common heritage of mankind.” In similar fashion, the Tunis Summit would claim cyberspace as a UN-regulated “common heritage.”
thenewamerican.com
