UN Panel Aims to End Internet Tug of War by July

Owen DeLong owen at delong.com
Mon Feb 21 18:55:04 UTC 2005


My favorite quote is:

"All countries want to counter spam -- unsolicited commercial messages that 
can flood email accounts by the hundreds and burden the web with unwanted 
traffic."

Especially in lite of the comment you posted and the fact that developing
countries seem to be the major sources of SPAM these days.

Of course, given all the good that the ITU has done for telecommunications
and RF Spectrum control.... (NOT!)

Finally, there's the issue of can the internet really be "governed".  My
inclination is not.  ICANN certainly is not "governing" the internet.
Sure, ICANN has some level of control over the creation of new TLDs and
is responsible for handing out addresses and protocol/port numbers at
the top level, but, ICANN doesn't approve or reject new protocols.  They
don't control how packets are routed at any real operational level.  They
don't set any real policies other than those for address allocation.
Nor would they really be able to if they tried.  Further, ICANN gets
what little power it does have primarily from the consent of the
network operational community and general agreement that stable operations
within the ICANN framework is better than chaos.  If it comes to a tug
of war between ICANN and ITU, it will be interesting to see if anyone
actually wins.  How many operators will follow ICANN and how many will
follow ITU?  How many will simply start running a different Internet?
How many other competing ANAs will develop in the process?

Interesting times in the Chinese sense of the term.

Owen
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