UN WGIG final report
Joi Ito notes the release of the final report of the UN Working Group on Internet Governance.
The WGIG is a group of experts tasked by the United Nations to think about and come up with a report about Internet governance. Many people were concerned because the meeting was kicked off by the Secretary General of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) saying that this was about questioning ICANN. The comments gave me the sense that the ITU was trying to take over ICANN’s role and wanted a report to justify this. In fact, the group of experts represented a broad range of opinions and have produced an interesting report.
He also notes a handy set of resources, including illustrations of the 4 governance scenarios proposed in the report, available here.
I just skimmed through the report, and aside from the usual grumbling about the US having too much control over the DNS root servers, and the root server operators not being formally under anyone’s (government) control, there is a good list of policy issues that are hard to get at on a national basis and really do call for a broader international agreement (unclear that this needs to be at the UN or ITU, though).
Some of the policy issues enumerated in the report:
- Internet security and stability - lack of multilateral mechanisms, multijurisdictional criminal prevention and prosecution
- Spam
- Allocation of domain names, gTLDs
- Intellectual property rights
- Freedom of expression
- Data protection and privacy rights
- Consumer rights
I’m generally skeptical that the UN can make any useful contribution on the technology planning and administrative side of the internet. But it might be a place to get some government agreements on how to deal with spammers and hackers originating traffic from, say Brazil or China against targets elsewhere. Not that making it explicitly illegal would necessarily stop the problem, but it would be a step in the right direction.
Rough consensus and running code among dedicated people has taken us pretty far, but running a badly behaving network used to draw the criticism of your peers, and might lead to having your network unplugged. These days it’s not so practical, especially if the uncooperative network is an entire country.
Tags: internet, icann, government, wgig, un
