Deal reached on managing the Internet A summit focusing on narrowing the digital divide between the rich and poor residents and countries opened Wednesday with an agreement of sorts on who will maintain ultimate oversight of the Internet and the flow of information, commerce and dissent. The World Summit on the Information Society had been overshadowed by a lingering, if notvocal, struggle about overseeing the domain names and technical issuesthat make the Internet work and keep people from Pakistan to Canada surfing Web sites in the search for information, news and buying andselling. Negotiators from more than 100 countries agreed late Tuesday to leave the United States in charge of the Internet's addressing system, averting a U.S.-EU showdown at this week's U.N. technology summit. U.S. officials said early Wednesday that instead of transferring management of the system to an international body such as the United Nations, an international forum would be created to address concerns. The forum, however, would have no binding authority. U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce Michael Gallagher said the deal means the United States will leave day-to-day management to the private sector, through a quasi-independent organization called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. ''The Internet lives to innovate for another day,'' he told The Associated Press. Negotiators have met since Sunday to reach a deal ahead of the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society, which starts Wednesday. World leaders are expected to ratify a declaration incorporating the deal during the summit, which ends Friday.
Source: The Associated Press via The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Info-Summit.html -- Neil Schneider pacneil_at_linuxgeek_dot_net http://www.paccomp.com Key fingerprint = 67F0 E493 FCC0 0A8C 769B 8209 32D7 1DB1 8460 C47D Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government. - Jeremy Bentham, jurist and philosopher (1748-1832) -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
