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Internet governance is the development and application of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programs that shape the evolution and use of the Internet. This article describes how the Internet was and is currently governed, some of the controversies that occurred along the way, and the ongoing debates about how the Internet should or should not be governed in the future.
Internet governance should not be confused with E-Governance, which refers to governments' use of technology to carry out their governing duties.
No one person, company, organization or government runs the Internet. It is a
A month later, the Panel On Global Internet Cooperation and Governance Mechanisms (convened by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the World Economic Forum (WEF) with assistance from The Annenberg Foundation), supported and included the NetMundial statement in its own report.[48]
The meeting produced a nonbinding statement in favor of consensus-based decision-making. It reflected a compromise and did not harshly condemn mass surveillance or include the words "net neutrality", despite initial support for that from Brazil. The final resolution says ICANN should be under international control by September 2015.[46] A minority of governments, including Russia, China, Iran and India, were unhappy with the final resolution and wanted multi-lateral management for the Internet, rather than broader multi-stakeholder management.[47]
The NetMundial Initiative is a plan for international governance of the Internet that was first proposed at the Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance (GMMFIG) conference (23–24 April 2014)[41][42][43] and later developed into the NetMundial Initiative by ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade along with representatives of the World Economic Forum (WEF)[44] and the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (Comitê Gestor da Internet no Brasil), commonly referred to as "CGI.br".[45]
In October 2013, Fadi Chehadé, current President and CEO of ICANN, met with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in Brasilia. Upon Chehadé's invitation, the two announced that Brazil would host an international summit on Internet governance in April 2014.[37] The announcement came after the [36][39][40]
On 7 October 2013 the NSA surveillance scandal. The statement was signed by the heads of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Society, and the five regional Internet address registries (African Network Information Center, American Registry for Internet Numbers, Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre, Latin America and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry, and Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre).[34][35][36]
One controversial proposal to this effect, resulting from a September 2011 summit between India, Brazil, and South Africa (IBSA), would seek to move internet governance into a "UN Committee on Internet-Related Policy" (UN-CIRP).[30][31] The move was a reaction to a perception that the principles of the 2005 Tunis Agenda for the Information Society have not been met.[31][32] The statement called for the subordination of independent technical organizations such as ICANN and the ITU to a political organization operating under the auspices of the United Nations.[31] After outrage from India’s civil society and media, the Indian government backed away from the proposal.[33]
There were also suggestions that individual governments should have more control, or that the International Telecommunication Union or the United Nations should have a function in Internet governance.[29]
Other topics of controversy included the creation and control of country-code domains, recent proposals for a large increase in ICANN's budget and responsibilities, and a proposed "domain tax" to pay for the increase.
When the IANA functions were handed over to ICANN, a new U.S. nonprofit, controversy increased. ICANN's decision-making process was criticised by some observers as being secretive and unaccountable. When the directors' posts which had previously been elected by the "at-large" community of Internet users were abolished, some feared that ICANN would become illegitimate and its qualifications questionable, due to the fact that it was now losing the aspect of being a neutral governing body. ICANN stated that it was merely streamlining decision-making, and developing a structure suitable for the modern Internet.
The position of the U.S. Department of Commerce as the controller of some aspects of the Internet gradually attracted criticism from those who felt that control should be more international. A hands-off philosophy by the Department of Commerce helped limit this criticism, but this was undermined in 2005 when the Bush administration intervened to help kill the .xxx top-level domain proposal,[27] and, much more severely, following the 2013 disclosures of mass surveillance by the U.S. government.[28]
At the first World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva in 2003, the topic of Internet governance was discussed. ICANN's status as a private corporation under contract to the U.S. government created controversy among other governments, especially Brazil, China, South Africa, and some Arab states. Since no general agreement existed even on the definition of what comprised Internet governance, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan initiated a Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) to clarify the issues and report before the second part of the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis 2005. After much controversial debate, during which the U.S. delegation refused to consider surrendering the U.S. control of the Root Zone file, participants agreed on a compromise to allow for wider international debate on the policy principles. They agreed to establish an Internet Governance Forum, to be convened by the United Nations Secretary General before the end of the second quarter of 2006. The Greek government volunteered to host the first such meeting.[26]
In 1992 the BoardArchitectureInternet , and became part of ISOC. The Internet Engineering Task Force also became part of the ISOC. The IETF is overseen currently by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), and longer-term research is carried on by the Internet Research Task Force and overseen by the Internet Research Steering Group.
After Jon Postel's death in 1998, IANA became part of ICANN, a California nonprofit established in September 1998 by the U.S. government and awarded a contract by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Initially two board members were elected by the Internet community at large, though this was changed by the rest of the board in 2002 in a poorly attended public meeting in Accra, Ghana.[24]
Allocation of IP addresses was delegated to five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs):
From the early days of the network until his death during 1998, RFC Editor.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was formed during 1986 by the U.S. government to develop and promote Internet standards. It consisted initially of researchers, but by the end of the year participation was available to anyone, and its business was performed largely by email.[22][23]
During 1979 the Internet Configuration Control Board was founded by DARPA to oversee the network's development. During 1984 it was renamed the Internet Advisory Board (IAB), and during 1986 it became the Internet Activities Board.[20][21]
In 1990, the ARPANET was formally terminated. In 1991 the NSF began to relax its restrictions on commercial use on NSFNET and commercial network providers began to interconnect. The final restrictions on carrying commercial traffic ended on 30 April 1995, when the NSF ended its sponsorship of the NSFNET Backbone Service and the service ended.[18][19] Today almost all Internet infrastructure in the United States, and large portion in other countries, is provided and owned by the private sector. Traffic is exchanged between these networks, at major interconnection points, in accordance with established Internet standards and commercial agreements.
Between 1984 and 1986 the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) created the NSFNET backbone, using TCP/IP, to connect their supercomputing facilities. NSFNET became a general-purpose research network, a hub to connect the supercomputing centers to each other and to the regional research and education networks that would in turn connect campus networks.[17] The combined networks became generally known as the Internet. By the end of 1989, Australia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the UK were connected to the Internet, which had grown to contain more than 160,000 hosts.
To understand how the Internet is managed today, it is necessary to know a little of its history. The original ARPANET is one of the components which eventually evolved to become the Internet. As its name suggests the ARPANET was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency within the U.S. Department of Defense.[15] During the development of ARPANET, a numbered series of Request for Comments (RFCs) memos documented technical decisions and methods of working as they evolved. The standards of today's Internet are still documented by RFCs.[16]
Professors Jovan Kurbalic and Laura DeNardis also offer comprehensive definitions to "Internet Governance". According to Kurbalija, the broad approach to Internet Governance goes "beyond Internet infrastructural aspects and address other legal, economic, developmental, and sociocultural issues";[12] along similar lines, DeNardis argues that "Internet Governance generally refers to policy and technical coordination issues related to the exchange of information over the Internet".[13] One of the more policy-relevant questions today is exactly whether the regulatory responses are appropriate to police the content delivered through the Internet: it includes important rules for the improvement of Internet safety and for dealing with threats such as cyber-bullying, copyright infringement, data protection and other illegal or disruptive activities. [14]
Law professor Yochai Benkler developed a conceptualization of Internet governance by the idea of three "layers" of governance:[11]
A working group established after a UN-initiated World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) proposed the following definition of Internet governance as part of its June 2005 report:
The definition of Internet governance has been contested by differing groups across political and ideological lines.[9] One of the main debates concerns the authority and participation of certain actors, such as national governments, corporate entities and civil society, to play a role in the Internet's governance.
On 16 November 2005, the United Nations-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), held in Tunis, established the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to open an ongoing, non-binding conversation among multiple stakeholders about the future of Internet governance.[6] Since WSIS, the term "Internet governance" has been broadened beyond narrow technical concerns to include a wider range of Internet-related policy issues.[7][8]
The technical underpinning and standardization of the Internet's core protocols (IPv4 and IPv6) is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise.
However, to help ensure interoperability, several key technical and policy aspects of the underlying core infrastructure and the principal namespaces are administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is headquartered in Los Angeles, California. ICANN oversees the assignment of globally unique identifiers on the Internet, including domain names, Internet protocol addresses, application port numbers in the transport protocols, and many other parameters. This seeks to create a globally unified namespace to ensure the global reach of the Internet. ICANN is governed by an international board of directors drawn from across the Internet's technical, business, academic, and other non-commercial communities. However, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, continues to have final approval over changes to the DNS root zone.[1][2] This authority over the root zone file makes ICANN one of a few bodies with global, centralized influence over the otherwise distributed Internet.[3] In the 30 September 2009 Affirmation of Commitments by the Department of Commerce and ICANN, the Department of Commerce finally affirmed that a "private coordinating process…is best able to flexibly meet the changing needs of the Internet and of Internet users" (para. 4).[4] While ICANN itself interpreted this as a declaration of its independence, scholars still point out that this is not yet the case. Considering that the U.S. Department of Commerce can unilaterally terminate the Affirmation of Commitments with ICANN, the authority of DNS administration is likewise seen as revocable and derived from a single State, namely the United States.[5]
World Wide Web, File sharing, Instant messaging, Email, IPv6
Switzerland, Austria, Italy, United Kingdom, France
University of Toronto, Concurrent Euclid (programming language), Motorola, Unix-like, Operating system
Internet, Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, Domain name system, United States Department of Commerce, California
Internet, Internet governance, Rough consensus, Internet Society, Internet access
Human rights, Brazil, Internet, Internet governance, Freedom of information
Internet, 113th United States Congress, Human rights, Internet governance, Greg Walden
Internet, Google, Reston, Virginia, Geneva, Internet governance