A group of academic experts in Internet policy are calling on the US to accept the need for change in Internet governance.
The academics state that the US should assert leadership by advancing new proposals for cooperating with other countries in the oversight and supervision of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and by supporting the development of a global framework treaty that will protect the Internet’s unique freedoms while working jointly to resolve its problems.
“While we can justly claim that the US ‘invented’ the Internet,” Syracuse University professor Milton Mueller said, “with over a billion users now, US citizens are a small minority of the networked world. If the Internet’s central coordination functions are seen as a US strategic asset rather than as a neutral, globally-shared infrastructure, the risks of deliberate disruption and politicization of the Internet can only increase.”
The comments, part of a statement developed by the Syracuse University-based Internet Governance Project (IGP), came during a symposium sponsored by the IGP and three other university programs to assess the final report of the UN Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG).
The event, “Regime Change on the Internet? Internet Governance after WGIG,” was the first public forum in the United States to review the UN Working Group’s report. The report will become the basis of international negotiations at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva this September.
WSIS negotiations will be concluded at a summit in Tunisia in November 2005. For more information on the IGP click to internetgovernance.org.
