Make way for the UNternet?

Pressure is mounting to hand over control of the Internet to the United Nations. On December 10, 2003, the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) convened at Geneva, under the auspices of the UN's International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The summit's chief purpose was to explore ways to bring the Internet under government control, both domestically and internationally.

According to Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, "we are seeing a clear shift away from the mid-90s when governments were told to stay away [from the Internet]. Governments have shown they are very interested in getting involved on a domestic level and now they are looking at the international level." Certain governments with an acute interest in domestic control over--and strict censorship of--the Internet, including Communist China, Egypt and Brazil, pushed hard at Geneva for a new UN agency to regulate and censor Internet content. Such an agency would replace the California-based International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which has been criticized since its creation in 1998 for its alleged pro-business and private-sector bias.

Although the three-day summit ended with little concrete achievement, the UN intends to continue to work to wrest control of the Internet from the private sector. The next summit is scheduled to convene in Tunisia in 2005, when the UN's ITU--which already oversees international mail and telephone calls--will make another attempt to convert the Internet into a "global resource." As one UN official at the Geneva summit bluntly put it, "what we are looking at is the future management of the Internet. It's [about] what is the best way to manage what has become a natural resource for all humanity."