COPYCENSE

“The United Nations’ World Summit on the Information Society began with a high-minded purpose: to bridge the technological gap between richer and poorer nations. But now the WSIS event, which begins Nov. 16 in Tunisia, has transformed into a week-long debate about who should control key portions of the Internet.

“Delegates from nations like Iran, China, and Cuba have been clear in what they want: less control by the U.S. government. Instead, they’ve suggested creation of some sort of cyberbureaucracy—perhaps under the U.N. International Telecommunication Union.”

Declan McCullagh. Newsmaker: Internet Showdown in Tunis. News.com. Nov. 11, 2005.

See also:

United Nations. World Summit on the Information Society.

Bill Thompson. Development Matters More Than Domains. BBC News. Nov. 11, 2005.

Associated Press. Showdown Over Control of Net Expected at U.N. Summit. SiliconValley.com. Nov. 10, 2005.

David Talbot. ICANN Feud: It’s So 1995. Technology Review. Nov. 9, 2005. (“The original grand goal of the United Nations’ World Summit on the Information Society was to devise a strategy for lifting the developing world into the information age. But another issue has risen to the fore: multi-national control of the naming system on the Internet, a job now done by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a California-based organization that oversees the Internet’s domain name and addressing system. All of this discussion over back-end architectures, however, misses the point of the U.N. summit, which should focus on basic questions of access, security, and censorship.”)

Gene J. Koprowski. Academics Take Sides in ICANN Tug of War. eWeek. Nov. 4, 2005.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.