A Digital Future
prepared first the Geneva Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action (2003), followed by the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society (2005), which identified a range of critical issues for the world community to address, particularly with respect to Financial Mechanisms to support ICT development, as well as Internet Governance (see below). Subsequent to the World Summit, the participants agreed that there should be ongoing follow-up and implementation activities, which have continued under the auspices of the UNCTAD, UNESCO, UNDP, and ITU.
Science Foundation‘s NSFNET, most of the basic protocols and technical standards that still govern the Internet‘s operations were introduced and long controlled by the United States government. This control extended to the creation and financing, for example, of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 1986, the informal Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) since 1988, and IANA‘s formal successor, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) beginning in 1998, all initially under U.S. government contracts.
Internet Governance One of the most vital new areas of international cooperation, and a key theme of the WSIS, is Internet governance: the policies and institutions that manage the day-to-day functioning of the global Internet, and its ongoing evolution. The globalization of ICTs and the central place of the Internet in nearly every society has given rise to increasing calls for changes to the historically United States-centric mechanisms which continue to dominate much of the Internet‘s oversight.
The current institutional structure of Internet governance arose with the establishment of the Internet Society (ISOC) in 1992, which was organized outside of any official government agency, with membership open to any individual, organization, company, or agency with an interest in contributing to the Internet‘s development (see Figure 7.10). Over time, the ISOC has absorbed other organizations, including the IETF and the IANA (see diagram). However, the IANA‘s critical function of controlling naming and numbering conventions – the assignment of top-level domains among countries and ultimately the distribution of web addresses and associated URL numbering has remained with ICANN (which continues to administer IANA).
Because the Internet emerged from an unplanned and disjointed sequence of events, but was initially underwritten and operated by the U.S. Defense Department‘s ARPANET and later the National Figure 7.10 Internet Architecture Organizations
Source: ITU, The Future Internet, 2009.
This status quo, among other related issues, was central to the discussions and negotiations of the WSIS. Representatives of a majority of the world‘s governments as well as many international civil society organizations, took the view that governance of the global Internet should be permanently
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removed from the influence and control of any one government (the United States), and made the collective responsibility of a neutral international forum. The U.S. government has resisted this change, while proposing that ICANN should operate on an essentially autonomous basis as a non-
Telecommunications Regulation Handbook