By Kieren McCarthy in Tunis for The Register
This article has been reproduced from The Register, with
permission.
The world's governments in Tunisia finally reached agreement at
10.30pm last night, just hours before the official opening of the
World Summit this morning. In the end, with absolutely no time
remaining, a deal was cut.
That deal will see the creation of a new Internet Governance
Forum, that will be set up next year and decide upon public policy
issues for the internet. It will be made up of governments as well
as private and civil society, but it will not have power over
existing bodies.
Equally, there will be no new oversight body for ICANN, or no
new ICANN come to that. Instead, all governments have agreed to
work within existing organisations. Effectively that will mean
within the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) of ICANN. Note the
word "advisory" because, again, the GAC has no powers of control
over ICANN.
However, head of ICANN Paul Twomey promised delegates that ICANN
was happy for the GAC to recreate itself as it saw fit. Twomey
later pointed out to us that although the ICANN Board has to
approve any GAC decision, there has yet to be an occasion when it
hasn't gone along with it. A special meeting of the GAC will be
convened at ICANN's conference in Vancouver in a fortnight's
time.
The deal represents a remarkable victory for the United States
and ICANN: only a month ago they were put on the back foot by an EU
proposal that turned the world's governments against the US
position.
But following an intense US lobbying effort across the board,
the Americans have got their way. Countless press articles, each as
inaccurate as the last, formed a huge public sense of what was
happening with internet governance that proved impossible to
shake.
Massive IT companies again, mostly US and thanks to
intense US government lobbying came out publicly in favour
of the status quo. And the EU representative, David Hendon,
confirmed to us last night that in political and governments
circles the US had pushed home its
points again and again.
A letter from US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice sent to the
EU just prior to the Summit also had a big impact. Hendon said the
UK's position was pretty much set by then, but that it may well
have had an impact on other EU members. The exact wording of the
letter has yet to come out but it is said to be pretty strong
stuff.
And so without the EU forcing the middle ground, and with the US
backed by Australia, the brokering pushed in no short
measure by chairman Massod Khan was led by Singapore and
Ghana. The result was that Brazil, China, Iran, Russia and numerous
other countries were stymied.
Because of the extremely short timetable, the only deal possible
was consensus. And every radical proposal was simply shot down.
Today will see a jubilant US ambassador David Gross, a resigned EU
(and one that may well learn some lobbying lessons in future) and a
depressed Brazil.
Everyone of course claims victory but the reality is that the US
has won out by shouting loudest. Expect to read numerous press
articles that claim the United States has saved the Internet from a
fate worse than death. That was never true, and there were never
any good real reasons why the US should not cede some control to an
international formation of governments. But reality and politics
have never been good bed-fellows.
The shift to an international body will still happen but it will
now be at least five years down the line.
The plus point of all this great theatre however is that the
world, and its governments, are now infinitely more aware of how
this internet thing really works.
© The Register
2005
