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Should the UN administer the Internet?

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VoIP,
Icann,
UN,
ITU

Declan McCullagh CNET News.com

Published: 30 Mar 2005 16:05 BST

The International Telecommunication Union is one of the most venerable of bureaucracies. Created in 1865 to facilitate telegraph transmissions, its mandate has expanded to include radio and telephone communications.

But the ITU enjoys virtually no influence over the Internet. That remains the province of specialised organisations such as the ICANN, the IETF the W3C and regional address registries.

The ITU, a United Nations agency, would like to change that. "The whole world is looking for a better solution for Internet governance, unwilling to maintain the current situation," Houlin Zhao, director of the ITU's Telecommunication Standardisation Bureau, said last year. Zhao, a former government official in China's Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, has been in his current job since 1999.

Though Zhao is far too diplomatic to state it directly, the ITU's increasing interest in the Internet could presage a power struggle between ITU, ICANN, and perhaps even the US government, which retains some oversight authority over ICANN and appears content with the current structure.

In a series of speeches over the last year, Zhao has suggested that the ITU could become involved in everything from security and spam to managing how IP addresses are assigned. The ITU also is looking into some aspects of VoIP communications, another potential area for expansion.

"Countering spam is just one of many elements of protecting the Internet that include availability during emergencies and supporting public safety and law enforcement officials," Zhao wrote in December. Also, he wrote, the ITU "would take care of other work, such as work on Internet exchange points, Internet interconnection charging regimes, and methods to provide authenticated directories that meet national privacy regimes."

ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com recently spoke with Zhao about the ITU's increased interest in the Internet and its involvement in a series of meetings that will conclude in November with a UN World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia.

Q: How do you see the ITU becoming involved in Internet governance over the next few years?
A: As you know, Internet governance was one of two hot topics left from the first phase of the UN world summit. Unfortunately we did not have a clear definition of Internet governance. Therefore the group established by Kofi Annan still has to work on these definitions.

Anything which concerns the future development of the Internet will be part of the question of Internet governance. It covers a very wide range of topics not just related to technology development, service development, but also policy matters, sovereignty, security, privacy, almost anything.

According to ITU's definition of "telecommunications", telecommunications covers almost anything. Therefore according to our own lawyers, the Internet is one of these telecommunications mediums. Others argue that "telecommunications" is too wide and it does not include the Internet.