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The Guardian says:
After troubled negotiations in Geneva, the US may be forced to relinquish control of the internet to a coalition of governments, and:
There are still dozens of unanswered questions but all the answers are pointing the same way: international governments deciding the internet's future. The internet will never be the same again. Internet guru Milton Mueller has a long post on Politechbot.com discussing the issue:
The politics in Geneva were driven by an alliance between the European Union, states critical of ICANN such as Brazil, and authoritarian states such as China, Iran and Pakistan. All agreed to create an "Inter-Governmental Council for global public policy and oversight of Internet governance." Unlike ICANN, this Council would exclude civil society and the private sector from participating in policy making. It would set up a top-down, regulatory relationship between a governmental Council and the people who actually produce and use the Internet. As we have learned from the past two years, most governments have little interest in solving the real problems of the Internet. They prefer to play political games: asserting "national sovereignty" over a global communication medium, censoring inconvenient sources of information, thinking of ways to protect national telecom monopolies from internet-driven competition, grabbing control of country names in the domain name space, excluding Taiwan, and so on.
The US government and ICANN have resisted inter-governmental oversight, contending that intergovernmental supervision can be politically unstable and dangerous to the Internet's autonomy. But the US still seems not to understand how its own insistence on unilateral oversight creates the same instability. There's more. And Declan McCullagh raises the possibility of a bifurcated Net. (Response to Declan here.)
posted by James DeLong @ 1:52 PM | Internet: P2P, Search Engines...
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