U.N. bureaucrats and telecommunications ministers from many less-developed nations claim the U.S. government has undue influence over how things run online. Now they want to be the ones in charge.
While the formal proposal from a U.N. working group will be released July 18, it's already clear what it will contain. A preliminary summary of governmental views claims there's a "convergence of views" supporting a new organization to oversee crucial Internet functions, most likely under the aegis of the United Nations or the International Telecommunications Union.
Beyond the usual levers of diplomatic pressure and public kvetching, Brazil and China could choose what amounts to the nuclear option: a fragmented root.
At issue is who decides key questions like adding new top-level domains, assigning chunks of numeric Internet addresses, and operating the root servers that keep the Net humming. Other suggested responsibilities for this new organization include Internet surveillance, "consumer protection," and perhaps even the power to tax domain names to pay for "universal access."
This development represents a grave political challenge to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which was birthed by the U.S. government to handle some of those topics.
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This borders on an outrage, as far as we're concerned. We don't like the UN to begin with. Now we're supposed to surrender to them control of something we developed? What's next? Allow a foreign tribunal to impose sanctions against us? Oh wait. That's already happening.
Americans love their Internet. Maybe this will be the thing that galvanizes broad-based disgust with the UN, and we will cease kowtowing to them. We won't count on it, but we can hope.
