The United States, backed by the European Union, Japan and Canada, has turned back a bid by developing nations to place the Internet under the control of the United Nations or its member governments,
the Washington Times reports.
"We feel as the system gets more complex, we don't want the whole question of Internet governance to be concentrated around the existing ICANN, which is closely linked to the U.S. Department of Commerce," a senior Brazilian diplomat said
Various elements of the public and private sector have been charged with studying the governance of the Internet, and are due to make a report sometime in 2005.
This raises a number of interesting questions about the Internet as a whole.
The dispute, ultimately, must be a fundamental one: can the Internet be governed as though it were a real space? Is it possible (or even desirable) to impose sovereign authority over a medium that extends effortlessly acorss traditional national borders?
As far as I'm concerned, probably not. At least, not in countries that value the free speech of their citizens (third world countries and China have had some success censoring the Internet; either through filtering or simple denial of access.) A number of metaphors, good and bad, have been proposed in aan effort to help us apply legislation to it: the Internet is a printing press, a flea market, the Roman Forums or a Xerox machine, depending on which function you want to govern.
This is the basic problem with most of the Internet regulation, so far: we're still attempting to govern the Internet in terms of time, distance, and borders. These don't work very well because as long as one country decides that it's policy on the Internet is going to be a little more relaxed, things go all apeshit for every other country.
As even some microsoft researchers have argued (microsoft word doc; the paper as a whole isn't particularly relevant to the UN, but it's interesting and you should read it if you have time), the Internet becomes more difficult to regulate as technology improves. So regulating content, "governing," the Internet is probably impossible without tight controls over the Internet's actual physical components, which all governments are unlikely to allow in unison.
Some sort of international ICANN is one solution, but as the UN will find out, it may well be unworkable.
