Internet
The Internet has 1.5 billion users, with 300 million in the 27-nation EU, the European Commission said in a statement today in Brussels. In the future, the networks governance should reflect its global nature, the EU executive said.
An agreement that gave the U.S. Commerce Department control over the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, expires Sept. 30. The non-profit company, based in Marina del Ray, California, was created in 1998 to oversee computer servers that manage databases of domain names, which are suffixes of Web sites such as “.com.”
The EU pressure comes as Icann begins a meeting in Sydney on June 21 to discuss the addition of new top-level domain names. The U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing on June 4 to discuss Icanns U.S. supervision. Lawmakers, both Democrats and Republicans, said they favor U.S. oversight.
Bart Forbes, a spokesman for the Commerce Departments National Telecommunications and Information Administration, had no comment when reached by telephone today in Washington.
The commission said that Icann should operate within “clear guidelines defined through an international dialogue.”
“The network should be managed by private bodies within principles agreed upon by public authorities but without government interference in day-to-day operations,” the EU executive said in the statement.
Internet Community
European Telecommunications Commissioner Viviane Reding said Icann is approaching an “historic point.” She questioned whether it will become a “fully independent organization, accountable to the global Internet community.”
The U.S. has come under pressure from other nations to adapt Internet governance as countries seek to manage their domain names, such as .fr, .uk and .eu.
Nations have also said the current structure creates security issues, particularly after Estonias Web sites were attacked by hackers in May 2007 amid a diplomatic clash with Russia over a war memorial.