Bullet Dodged
The US government will retain overall control of the technology which powers the internet – its domain name system, root servers and the oversight of the California-based, not-for-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) which looks after it all – for the foreseeable future.Interestingly, the EU has apparently backed right off.An Internet Governance Forum will be created to discuss and decide upon the over-reaching issues of the internet, but, crucially, will not have any oversight powers. Governments have also agreed to work within existing organisations and infrastructures to gradually transform the way the internet is run.
guardian
This is one of those situations where those who can actually do the job control the job and the sidewalk superintendents are rightfully ignored. Apparently Secretary of State Rice sent the EU something of a rocket. But I suspect the deal was done when companies like Google and Microsoft put the boots into changing the way the internet is governed.
The silly threat of the Chinese and the more aggressive euros was that they would set up their own root servers and have their own internet…which no one would use because it would lack several billion of the 8 billion pages of content Google indexes and, potentially, lack Google itself.
(Google Base is up….)
Even if they had set up their own root servers, nobody would have used them. The only thing emptier than that threat is Kofi Annan’s skull.