WSIS - Net governance: Will anything change?

Let's call it a clash of cultures: engineers who know the Internet inside out on the one side and government policy makers grappling to understand it on the other.

For the past two years, both parties have been engaged in a frequently acrimonious debate on how the Internet should be governed. That debate reached its zenith at the United Nations-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis, Tunisia, last week when all declared victory.

How, you may ask, can everyone claim victory when some of the opposing groups are about as far away as the Earth and moon? The answer: the agreement on Internet governance signed in Tunis is open to interpretation. Nearly everyone -- the governments of the U.S. and the European Union as well as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) -- are reading into the agreement essentially what they want to read.

Take, for example, the U.S., which has fought to retain its historic role of managing the Internet to the extent of angering one of its biggest economic allies, the E.U.

"The document is fabulous," David Gross, ambassador for the bureau of economic and business affairs at the U.S. Department of State and the person who lead the U.S. delegation, said in an interview hours after the agreement was signed. "There were proposals to create a governmental organization that might control many technical aspects of the Internet and, through this, content as well. This is now off the table. There is no change to the U.S. role, no change to ICANN."

Now the E.U. take: "The role of ICANN shouldn't change but what has to change is the oversight role," said Martin Selmayr, a spokesman for E.U. Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding, in a telephone interview also hours after the agreement was signed.

As the E.U. sees it, the U.S. has consented to considering a new oversight body by agreeing to the wording "enhanced cooperation" in the document signed by government delegates. The E.U. and other countries are demanding "oversight in cooperation and on equal footing," Selmayr said.

Not only governments have rendered opposing interpretations. Organizations either directly involved in the daily operations of the Internet -- i.e., ICANN -- or those hoping to have a greater say, such as the ITU, have their own views as well.

"First of all, the agreement has not threatened the security and stability of the core operations of the Internet," ICANN President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Paul Twomey, said. "For users, nothing is going to change from the present situation. This is very good because untried models, which had been discussed, could have been destabilizing."

Twomey went on to say that governments need to be heard and that the planned Internet Governance Forum will give them a platform to air their views.

The ITU has a different opinion. Robert Shaw, Internet strategy and policy advisor at the ITU, points to powerful wording in the document that suggests a dramatic change -- if not an end -- to the dominate role the U.S. has played in managing the Internet. "There are several paragraphs that call for changes in the way the Internet is governed today," he said. "And the U.S. has agreed to these. That's a fact."