The “Internet Governance War is Over” With New International Forum 

But Concrete Power Remains in US Hands

November 16, 2005

RIF/FIRE Press Release by Margaret Thompson

Declaring that the “internet governance war is over,” officials at the World Summit on the Information Society announced today that an agreement was reached regarding this hotly contested issue of who should set policy and have control over the Internet.  With the official WSIS conference starting today, negotiations were completed just in time to present a final document to the official government delegations participating in WSIS. 

While concrete power of management and oversight will remain in the hands of a private company in the United States, the WSIS resolution calls for establishment of an Internet Governance Forum (IGF) for multi-stakeholder dialogue, to provide input on governance issues, according to R. Shaw, an Internet Policy Analyst for the ITU.  Thus the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) headquartered in California will continue to handle day-to-day tasks and technical issues, with its decisions relayed to the US government for final approval. 

The IGF, which will consist of representatives from government, business, civil society and NGOs, represents a step toward making Internet governance more participatory and transparent, but it would have no concrete power beyond providing input and expertise, and its recommendations are non-binding.

The IGF also provides a venue for international input and dialogue about issues related to spam, Internet fraud, security issues, etc..  For example, Shaw noted that until today, issues related to spam were handled by multiple forums, whereas under the WSIS resolution they would be handled by a single forum of the IGF.

Another change involves giving greater sovereignty to individual countries about decisions regarding their country code domain names (eg .uk for United Kingdom or .jp for Japan). 

Countries are also encouraged to form national, regional and international forums to handle more local or regional Internet governance issues.

The first meeting of the IGF will be held next year in Athens, Greece.

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