EU, U.S. slug it out in cyberspace
It is not every day that world leaders have either the time or inclination to discuss the finer points of Internet domain name control.
But when U.S. President George W. Bush met European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso in the White House Tuesday he made a point of voicing his concerns about attempts to strip the United States of one of the most powerful weapons to come out of U.S. defense research: the Internet. Washington is riled at the European Union's decision to drop its support for the current system of Internet control, where Washington oversees the work of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the non-profit Californian organization that distributes I.P. addresses and creates and allocates suffixes such as .com, .org and .net. Brussels believes the United States' exclusive control over a global resource such as the Internet should be shared with the rest of the world's countries, although it stops short of calling for the creation of a new U.N. body to govern cyberspace. "We have to have a platform where leaders of the world can express their thoughts about the Internet," European Commissioner for Information Society Viviane Reding said last week. "If they have the impression that the Internet is dominated by one nation and it does not belong to all the nations, then the result could be that the Internet falls apart. "The EU's about-turn -- previously it had voiced no disquiet with the current U.S.-controlled system -- was greeted with much applause in Brazil and Iran, where governments have threatened to create their own Internet if the United States refuses to relinquish some control of cyberspace. Communist China and Cuba, countries not renowned for their enthusiasm for information sharing, support the EU's call for less U.S. government control of the Internet but go a step further in advocating an international body to oversee the Web.Critics of the current system argue the United States should not be allowed to control phone directories in Denmark or be allowed to allocate ZIP codes in India -- which is the equivalent of what ICANN is capable of doing in cyberspace. They also point to the Bush administration's recent decision to veto the creation of an .xxx suffix for sites with an adult content as proof that the United States should not be the world's sole arbiter of good or bad taste. U.S. officials find it inexplicable that the Brussels-based club has ganged up with the likes of Russia, China and Iran ahead of a U.N. summit on the information society in Tunisia next month. They argue that ICANN has never abused its authority and always adopted a light-touch approach to regulating the Internet.
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