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Other Nations Hope to Loosen U.S. Grip on Internet
November 15th, 2005

The kind of power to hinder or foster freedom of the Internet, centralized in a single government, is the crucial issue for many of the 12,000 people expected in Tunis this week for a United Nations summit meeting on the information age, reports The New York Times

internet.gif … A figurative ocean separates the American position - that the Internet works fine as it is - from most of the rest of the world. That includes the European Union, which says the Internet is an international resource whose center of gravity must move away from Washington.

… Whether this week’s final debates break the deadlock and produce any agreement to give other governments more sway over Internet policy was in some doubt last week. Even a recent discussion of Internet governance between President Bush and Jos√© Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, did not bring the sides any closer.

Picture left: Global Internet Map 2002

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Comments
1 - Graham Hill
Tue, Nov 15, 2005
@ 04:49

As a European citizen, it find it sad to say that I have much more confidence in the intentions of the US Government towards the Internet’s future development, than I do in the European Community’s, let alone any of the other somewhat less democratic governments.

There are times when it is clearly better to seek to control only what you must, rather than what you can. This may be one of those times.

Graham Hill
From Cologne, Germany

2 - Howard Rheingold
Tue, Nov 15, 2005
@ 09:47

I would hardly consider myself an uncritical backer of US government policies, but I don’t think Internet governance is broken, and I wonder if anybody out there can back up claims I have heard that the idea of turning control over to the UN has been enthusiastically backed by China, Iran, and Libya — governments whose track record in regard to free speech on the Internet is not exactly exemplary.

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