Who will controle the internet in the future
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - The European Union insisted Friday the job of Internet traffic cop must be shared by governments and the private sector.
The U.S. wants to remain the Internet's ultimate authority, rejecting calls in a United Nations meeting in Geneva for a U.N. body to take over.
EU spokesman Martin Selmayr rejected American claims the EU had changed direction.
"We are looking for a new cooperation model, a model that allows Internet governance and the laying down of public policy principles in coordination by all countries which are interested in the governance of the Internet because the Internet is a global resource," he said.
"The EU ... is very firm on this position."
The Geneva talks were the last preparatory meeting before November's World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia.
Negotiators said there was a growing sense a compromise had to be reached and that no single country ought to be the ultimate authority over such a vital part of the global economy.
A top U.S. official said the U.S. was "deeply disappointed," with an EU proposal, made Wednesday, which appeared to support wresting control of domain names from the U.S.-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, and placing it with an intergovernmental group, possibly under the United Nations.
"We will not agree to the U.N. taking over the management of the Internet," said Ambassador David Gross, the U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy at the State Department.
"Some countries want that. We think that's unacceptable."
But Selmayr insisted the EU and U.S. were not that far apart though tensions have sunk any chance of agreement in Geneva this week.
"That doesn't mean they're won't be a result in the end," he said.
"We are very close with the United States on a number of important principles. It is not for governments to control the Internet. We need more private sector involvement and the current working methods of ICANN are very efficient."
The stalemate over who should serve as the principal traffic cops for Internet routing and addressing may derail the November summit which aims to ensure a fair sharing of the Internet for the benefit of the whole world.
Internet governance historically has been the role of the U.S., which created the original system and funded much of its early development.
While this satisfies some, developing countries are upset that Western countries that got onto the Internet first gobbled up most available addresses required for computers to connect, leaving poor nations to share a limited supply.
ICANN now controls the Internet's master directories, which tell Web browsers and e-mail programs how to direct traffic.
Net surfers worldwide use them daily but policy decisions could, at a stroke, make all Web sites ending in a specific suffix essentially unreachable.
Though the computers themselves - 13 in all, known as "root" servers - are in private hands, they contain government-approved lists of the 260 or so Internet suffixes, such as ".com."
In 1998, the U.S. Commerce Department selected ICANN, a private organization with international board members, to decide what goes on those lists. Commerce kept veto power, but indicated it would let go once ICANN met a number of conditions.
But earlier this year, the United States indicated Commerce would keep that control, regardless of whether and when those conditions were met.
A U.N. panel has outlined four possible options for the future of Internet governance, ranging from keeping the current system intact to revamping it under new international agencies formed under the auspices of the U.N.
