US to keep control of Internet traffic system

TUNIS, Tunisia - The United States will keep control of the domain-name system that guides online traffic under an agreement on Wednesday seen as a setback to efforts to internationalize one of the pillars of the Internet.

Negotiators at the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society said they had agreed to set up a forum to discuss "spam" e-mail and other Internet issues and explore ways to narrow the technology gap between rich and poor countries.

But oversight of the domain-name system will remain with the United States, a setback for the European Union and other countries that had pushed for international control of one of the most important technical aspects of the Internet.

The European Union said in a statement that the agreement would lead to "further internationalization of Internet governance, and enhanced intergovernmental cooperation to this end."

"In the short term, US oversight is not immediately challenged, but in the long term they are under the obligation to negotiate with all the states about the future and evolution of Internet governance," said a member of the EU delegation who declined to be identified.

The US said the agreement essentially endorses the status quo.

"There's nothing new in this document that wasn't already out there before," said Ambassador David Gross, the head of the US delegation.

"We have no concerns that it could morph into something unsavory," he said about the forum.

The summit was launched two years ago with a focus on bringing technology to the developing world, but US control of the domain-name system had become a sticking point for countries like Iran and Brazil, who argued that it should be managed by the United Nations or some other global body.

The United States argued that such a body would stifle innovation with red tape. The EU in recent months had sought to reach a compromise between the two sides.

"Let me be absolutely clear: the United Nations does not want to take over, police or otherwise control the Internet," said UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. "Day-to-day running of the Internet must be left to technical institutions, not least to shield it from the heat of day to day politics."

Under the agreement, a California nonprofit body known as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, will continue to oversee the system that matches addresses like "reuters.com" with numerical addresses that computers can understand.

Individual countries will have greater control over their own domains, such as China's .cn or France's .fr. Disputes have arisen on occasion between national governments and the independent administrators assigned to manage these domains by ICANN.

Businesses, technical experts and human-rights groups will be allowed to participate along with governments in the forum, which will first meet in early 2006.

"Internet governance requires a multi-stakeholder approach. This is why we have suffered such agonies in our discussions on Internet governance," said Yoshio Utsumi, who heads the International Telecommunications Union, the UN organization that sponsored the summit.