"Control the Internet? A Futile Pursuit, Some Say"

Read John Markoff's full article in The New York Times. (Registration required.)

"A meeting sponsored by the United Nations this week in Tunis will take up a challenge to American authority over Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Icann was established in 1998 to manage the Domain Name System, or D.N.S., which assigns network names like disney.com and assures unique addresses.......

"The Tunis meeting, called the World Summit on the Information Society, will consider calls for an end to unilateral American oversight.

"'Everyone seems to think that the D.N.S. system is a big deal, but it's not the heartbeat of the Internet,' said Leonard Kleinrock, a computer scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who did pioneering research in data packet switching, the fundamental technique underlying networks. 'Who controls the flow of the ocean? Nobody controls it, and it works just fine. There are some things that can't be controlled and should be left distributed.'

"To varying degrees, the nine proposals to be considered by as many as 15,000 delegates convening Wednesday to Friday in Tunis call for replacing the United States as the overseer of Icann with a new international political structure, perhaps a treaty-based organization like the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency.........

"In recent years, Icann has become a lightning rod, focusing opposition to American political and economic power. A group of countries, led by developing nations like Iran, China and Brazil, has put forward a range of proposals calling for Icann's management to be made international; most call for a shift to a group like the United Nations. Over the summer, a European Union commissioner offered a parallel proposal.

"At Tunis, "either there will be an agreement, or an agreement on how to go about getting an agreement," Arthur Levin, a representative of the International Telecommunication Union and the chief organizer of the meeting, said in a telephone interview on Friday..........

"'The idea of taking over Icann is a nonstarter,' said Robert Kahn........'There is nothing in there to control, and there are huge issues that the governments of the world really do need to work on.'"