Big Brother will continue to watch over us - US keeps control of Internet
TUNIS, Tunisia (AP) — A U.N. technology summit opened Wednesday after an 11th-hour agreement that leaves the United States with ultimate oversight of the main computers that direct the Internet's flow of information, commerce and dissent.
A lingering and vocal struggle over the Internet's plumbing and its addressing system has overshadowed the summit's original intent: to address ways to expand communications technologies to poorer parts of the world. Negotiators from more than 100 countries agreed late Tuesday to leave the United States in charge, through a quasi-independent body called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. That averted a U.S.-EU showdown that threatened to derail the so-called World Summit on the Information Society.
"If the Internet had been developed in Australia, I don't think we would have had so much heat on this discussion," ICANN chief Paul Twomey, an Australian, remarked of the tension surrounding the U.S. control of the Internet. The computers under dispute control Internet traffic by acting as its master directories so Web browsers and e-mail programs can find other computers. Although Pakistan and other countries sought a takeover of that system by an international body such as the United Nations, negotiators ultimately agreed, as time ran out, to a create an open-ended international forum for raising important Internet issues. The forum, however, would have no binding authority.
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