http://news.com.com/2100-1028-5179694.html United Nations ponders Net's future March 26, 2004 By Declan McCullagh UNITED NATIONS--The United Nations wants a big piece of the Internet. At a summit here this week, delegates from around the world gathered to take a preliminary step toward U.N. involvement in some of the areas that are bedeviling Internet users and governments alike, including spam, network security, privacy and the regulation of the technical underpinnings that control the sprawling global network. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan set the tone in a speech Thursday, criticizing the current system through which Internet standards are set and domain names are handled, a process currently dominated by the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan. Such structures "must be made accessible and responsive to the needs of all the world's people," Annan said. On Friday, the summit will hear recommendations from five different U.N. working groups on topics including everything from domain names to root server operation to free speech and intellectual property to privacy. Although the U.N. process is still in its early stages, the result could dramatically reshape the way the Internet is run and put an end to some of the informal, collaborative processes that exist today. The master "root servers" that serve up addresses for country codes and all other top-level domains, for instance, are operated in part by volunteers instead of through a U.N.-style apparatus. Dozens of delegates from developing nations echoed Annan's remarks throughout the rest of the day, arguing that their governments do not have a voice in the way the Internet is operated and that more money and investment from richer nations is the only way to end the so-called digital divide. Khalid Saeed, the secretary of Pakistan's Ministry of Information Technology, said his country must "play an active role in all layers" of organizations that control the operation of the modern Internet. [...] _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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