By ALAN DAWSON
Who controls access to the internet?
Fri Nov 11, 2005 23:53
64.140.158.61
Who controls access to the internet?
If the UN gets its way cyberspace could suddenly become a lot smaller
By ALAN DAWSON
9 Nov 2005
In the middle of next week, the United Nations is convening yet another session of its grandly named World ''Summit'' on the Information Society. It is not a summit at all, but it is part of a campaign to hijack the internet and place it firmly under the thumb of the worst sort of governments. It is a shame and a disgrace that a few of the people involved in this campaign are from countries whose citizens also stand to lose the most. The European Commissioner for Internet Affairs supports it, for example.
The justification for this is that the internet's workings are managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), which has an international board and a Brussels office, but a US heritage. Mostly because it's a good time to be anti-US, a number of rather bad actors are taking advantage to try to wrest control away from Icann and place it with a UN group, mainly so that those bad actors can start serious whittling of the freedom of the internet, instead of doing it piecemeal, country by country.
Icann keeps the 'net working through the domain name and addressing system (DNS). It's not broken, does not need fixing, and while Icann has both faults and foibles, the bottom line is that the internet is humming beautifully. For certain, no one has claimed the UN could make it work better.
The proposal to place the technical workings and standards of the internet under the control of the United Nations is as abhorrent as the last great UN power play against the media and free dissemination of information _ the attempt by Unesco 20 years ago to licence all media workers and journalists.
Now, as then, the would-be hijackers are righteous only in the sense they are against Western control.
But this time, the UN is much slicker, much more polished. Instead of a corrupt, bloated bureaucracy called Unesco, the attack on free information is under the control of the little, low-key International Telecommunications Union, a group last seen writing standards for modems. Instead of a high-profile, blustering publicity lover, the campaign to hijack the internet is run by a former bureaucrat in China's Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, which is China's internet censor but not widely known enough to be detested.
The ''summit'' is to be in Tunisia, a country which censors the Internet, and has specifically censored it for this summit. Yet the UN continues to claim it only wants to share the workings of the 'net with the US, its ''inventor'', and has no desire to stifle any dissent.
Censor the internet? Perish the thought, wrote UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan last Saturday in a curious propaganda column in the Washington Post to try to put on the last-minute diplomatic pressure.
''Censoring cyberspace,'' he wrote ''would mean turning our backs on one of today's greatest instruments of progress.'' The secretary-general thus raised the question: What is this ''would mean'' stuff?
The people who sign the secretary-general's generous pay cheques not only censor the internet today, they beat, torture and imprison to do it. They block huge chunks of information, black out entire subjects, and harass, arrest and jail anyone who tries to circumvent their restrictions. Already the Chinese can neither watch nor read BBC broadcasts, Syrians are blocked from thousands of information sources and of course Thais cannot access websites dealing with sensitive matters such as government corruption, election fraud and the insurgency in the South. Beijing not only censors Google but its internet robots automatically kill any Microsoft blog that uses the word ''democracy''.
There is no question the more brutish governments of the world ''would'' censor cyberspace. They already do it. Mr Annan may not have heard of it, but the host government for his internet summit in Tunisia has specifically a freedom of speech website established by activist Neila Charchour Hachicha to serve the summit. How's that for ''turning our back'' to the internet?
Mr Annan's bosses and clients not only ''would'' censor the internet, they would censor it as much as they could. The beauty of the internet is that the 'net routes around damage. The old cliche said that the internet would continue to operate in a nuclear holocaust, and it probably would. Sure, Thailand can block a Pulo web site for many in the country but not for Tunisians. Tunis censors can block Yuzzi.org to most Tunisians and summit-goers, but not to us in Thailand. And that is what the United Nations members want to change, and why they are pushing this bogus business of ''American hegemony'' over the internet, and feigning innocence over claims they want to censor information, when all they want to do is hold hands and sing We Are the World.
''The UN isn't a threat to the 'net,'' Mr Annan claimed. Sure: You're from the UN and you're here to help us. But help us do what, exactly?
The Syrian delegate to a summit preparatory meeting complained about all the junk email, known as spam. Houlin Zhao, the former Beijing censor who is now chief of the UN's Telecommunication Standardisation Bureau and thus running for head of the internet, thinks there is too much cybercrime. The delegate from Brazil, which gave us nude Carnival photos, complained there is now too much pornography on the internet. But when a member of Icann tried to speak at the meeting, delegates from Syria, Brazil and China banged their desks to drown him out.
Yes. Spam, cybercrime and porn are internet problems. But the delegates of censorious countries have provided no hint of a plan to fight the problems any more than non-brutish countries. Here's a prediction: If they wrestle control of the internet into some new, bloated, overpaid, under-qualified United Nations committee, they still won't contribute a sliver of an idea on how to attack these problems.
Last week _ last week: Libya jailed a blogger for criticising the government; China shut down the popular, internationally acclaimed pro-democracy, anti-corruption site Microphone, run by Wang Yi, a teacher at China's Chengdu University; Egypt arrested a university student who criticised the government and Islamic extremists who tried to trash a Christian church, and Army commander Gen Sonthi Boonyaratglin supported closing all websites dealing with the southern insurgency except for the one the Army just opened.
Repeat: That is what we know happened in a single week of public actions by governments who, Mr Annan says, want to ''learn to work'' with online citizens so they can ''get their internet policies 'right', and coordinate with each other and with the internet community.''
That doesn't count the anti-internet diatribe by Veerasak Kowsurat, chairman of the House committee on women, children and the elderly, because that was the previous week, as was the praise by PM's Office Minister Suranand Vejjajiva for Chinese media control, broadcast by Radio Thailand.
Mr Zhao and his backers _ he has many _ want to lift backroom control of standards and domain names from the US-backed Icann and take it over. That way, if some government decided it wanted the name bangkokpost.com, for example, it would have UN backing to take it. Under the current system, ignoring governments, Icann guarantees that name to this newspaper, and the Icann system rescued that specific name when it was stolen some years ago. This system not only works well, but has worked well from the first day of the internet almost 40 years ago. It is simply not broken, and there's not a reason in the world to fix it.
But look. Up to now, at least, information is free and you are welcome to delve deeply into this issue. In fact maybe you should; it could be one of the last issues you will be free to investigate. And if you want to help governments to cooperate in website blocking, so that you cannot see web pages that offend the Chinese regime, visit sites that don't meet the standards of the Brazil government, or listen to online music declared distasteful by the Syrian dictatorship, by all means support the UN effort to take over running the internet.
http://archives.mybangkokpost.com/bkkarchives/frontstore/news_detail.html?aid=177204&textcat=General%20News&type=a&key=Who%20controls%20access%20to%20the%20internet?&year=&click_page=1&search_cat=text&from=text_search
~~~
Who Will Rule the Net?
Upcoming UN Summit to Decide Future Control of the Internet
By Jose Rivera
Epoch Times Chicago Staff
Nov 10, 2005
One of the great success stories of our time, the Internet, may soon be in for a major change.
Internet usage continues its global reach, with connected web users crossing cultural and national boundaries to tap the information highway. This expansion and popularity has caused many countries to examine who will control the Internet in the near future.
According to the Nielsen//NetRatings Home & Work Panel, by the summer of 2003 there were 580 million Internet users worldwide. At current growth rates, the Internet is expected to reach 1.21 billion by 2006, and 1.35 billion by 2007. [eTForecasts, Sept 2004]
With many countries using the Internet for development and procedure in government and private infrastructure—like Brazil, which heavily relies on the Internet for its tax collections—the question of Internet governance has become the focus of the upcoming U.N.’s World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).
Recently, government representatives from around the world met in Geneva at a preliminary meeting for the upcoming WSIS Summit, to be held Nov. 16-18 in Tunisia. At issue is control of the web’s “root” servers, which store index information and directories of the entire internet and are maintained by the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a private contractor to the United States Department of Commerce. As the Internet evolves and continues to grow, representatives from countries like Cuba, Iran, and China are objecting to future control by the US, opting instead for UN control.
At the end of preliminary talks in Geneva, a U.K. government and European Union representative made a surprise change of position, deciding not to support U.S. control and instead endorse the idea of international authority of the Internet. David Hendon, director of business relations for the U.K.’s Department of Trade and Industry, proposed assembling an international forum to set policy principles for ICANN and adjudicate complaints.
Martin Selmayr, spokesman for the EU, was quoted in the Washington Post as saying, “…the EU is proposing moving from unilateralism to multilateralism in Internet governance. Public policy principles…issued in the future should be discussed internationally.”
The U.S. is opposed to relinquishing Internet governance to the United Nations. David A. Gross, U.S. ambassador and coordinator of international communications and information policy for the State Department, told the Associated Press that despite EU support, “We will not agree to the U.N. taking over the management of the Internet. Some countries want that. We think that’s unacceptable.
“When the EU’s proposal was read, it was interesting how quickly it was endorsed in large part by countries such as Cuba, Iran, Saudi Arabia and others who have been very clear that they do not believe” in principles of free expression, Gross added.
The U.S. intends to keep all governments and politics out of the Internet’s growth, and preserve free-market development. In June the U.S. announced it would continue oversight of the Internet’s addressing and top-level domain system, even after the end of the current annual contract with ICANN, to keep the Internet secure.
Critics of U.N. control worry over larger, unruly bureaucracies containing countries vying for changes in international Internet policies. There is also the possibility of Internet taxation by the U.N. to build funds to support developing countries obtaining technology, or in the extreme the fragmentation of the Internet through the creation of other “root” servers and domains separate from ICANN control.
Not surprisingly, communist leaders in Beijing are leading proponents of U. N. supervision of the Internet, supporting joint international governance within the U.N. framework. But human rights groups are concerned about countries like China and their involvement in setting future Internet policy. Reporters without Borders, a media-freedom watchdog, says China oversees the most far-reaching Internet censorship and email surveillance anywhere, and is also ‘the world’s biggest prison for cyber-dissidents,’ more than 60 of whom are in jail.
Milton Mueller, Internet expert and author of “Ruling the Root,” told the U.K.’s Guardian, “I can’t see that a council is going to be able to improve the human rights situation.”
With nothing less than control of the Internet and the free flow of information at stake, how long can one country control it all, yet remain responsible to the whole world? The U.S., from the Internet’s public inception, has ruled the evolution of the web with little governmental interference, as noted by its record of non-reversal of any ICANN decisions. What would be the effect of U.N. control?
“I can’t imagine having to convene the governments of the world, or at least some task force, to measure those decisions about how to transfer a domain name from one registrar to another against all the treaties of the world,” Bret Fausett, a member of ICANN’s At-Large Advisory Committee, told internetnews.com. “It’s a level of bureaucracy that straightforward technical management issues don’t need.”
http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/5-11-10/34397.html
~~~
November 9, 2005
ICANN Working to Resolve U.N. Issue
By Jim Wagner
The board of directors at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) wants to hold a special meeting with their governmental members to discuss ways to head off the threat of United Nations (U.N.) intervention.
Vint Cerf, ICANN board chairman stated the board would like to hold a special meeting to discuss the role of Internet governance. He made his request in a letter to Mohamed Sharil Tarmizi, chairman of the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), posted to the ICANN Web site Wednesday.
The ICANN community is scheduled to meet in Vancouver, Canada, Nov. 30 - Dec. 4.
ICANN is fending off growing discontent among foreign countries who are angered by U.S.-centric policies that affect what is essentially an international Internet. Earlier this year, the U.S. reversed its policy to divest itself of veto power over the management of the 13 root servers that house the vast majority of top-level domains, such as .com and .net, to ICANN.
That global opposition has solidified around the U.N.-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and its Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG), which in July outlined four possible directions the world body could take regarding Internet governance.
U.S. officials are opposed to the U.N. taking over management of the Internet.
One of the WGIG recommendations was keeping ICANN intact but expanding the role of the organization's GAC. Cerf's letter to Tarmizi suggests that is exactly what it has in mind to fend off any move by the U.N. to subsume ICANN.
"As you have no doubt noticed, during the current [WSIS] a great deal of attention has been devoted to the role of governments in the process of 'Internet governance,'" Cerf wrote. "Obviously, this discussion directly relates to the role of the [GAC] in ICANN and raises the question of how that role could be strengthened within the existing multi-stakeholder mechanism and made more effective."
One possible way to accomplish this would be through the creation of a governmental supporting organization, which could give government representatives voting power on the ICANN board of directors.
The GAC is one of six non-
If the UN gets its way cyberspace could suddenly become a lot smaller
By ALAN DAWSON
9 Nov 2005
In the middle of next week, the United Nations is convening yet another session of its grandly named World ''Summit'' on the Information Society. It is not a summit at all, but it is part of a campaign to hijack the internet and place it firmly under the thumb of the worst sort of governments. It is a shame and a disgrace that a few of the people involved in this campaign are from countries whose citizens also stand to lose the most. The European Commissioner for Internet Affairs supports it, for example.
The justification for this is that the internet's workings are managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), which has an international board and a Brussels office, but a US heritage. Mostly because it's a good time to be anti-US, a number of rather bad actors are taking advantage to try to wrest control away from Icann and place it with a UN group, mainly so that those bad actors can start serious whittling of the freedom of the internet, instead of doing it piecemeal, country by country.
Icann keeps the 'net working through the domain name and addressing system (DNS). It's not broken, does not need fixing, and while Icann has both faults and foibles, the bottom line is that the internet is humming beautifully. For certain, no one has claimed the UN could make it work better.
The proposal to place the technical workings and standards of the internet under the control of the United Nations is as abhorrent as the last great UN power play against the media and free dissemination of information _ the attempt by Unesco 20 years ago to licence all media workers and journalists.
Now, as then, the would-be hijackers are righteous only in the sense they are against Western control.
But this time, the UN is much slicker, much more polished. Instead of a corrupt, bloated bureaucracy called Unesco, the attack on free information is under the control of the little, low-key International Telecommunications Union, a group last seen writing standards for modems. Instead of a high-profile, blustering publicity lover, the campaign to hijack the internet is run by a former bureaucrat in China's Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, which is China's internet censor but not widely known enough to be detested.
The ''summit'' is to be in Tunisia, a country which censors the Internet, and has specifically censored it for this summit. Yet the UN continues to claim it only wants to share the workings of the 'net with the US, its ''inventor'', and has no desire to stifle any dissent.
Censor the internet? Perish the thought, wrote UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan last Saturday in a curious propaganda column in the Washington Post to try to put on the last-minute diplomatic pressure.
''Censoring cyberspace,'' he wrote ''would mean turning our backs on one of today's greatest instruments of progress.'' The secretary-general thus raised the question: What is this ''would mean'' stuff?
The people who sign the secretary-general's generous pay cheques not only censor the internet today, they beat, torture and imprison to do it. They block huge chunks of information, black out entire subjects, and harass, arrest and jail anyone who tries to circumvent their restrictions. Already the Chinese can neither watch nor read BBC broadcasts, Syrians are blocked from thousands of information sources and of course Thais cannot access websites dealing with sensitive matters such as government corruption, election fraud and the insurgency in the South. Beijing not only censors Google but its internet robots automatically kill any Microsoft blog that uses the word ''democracy''.
There is no question the more brutish governments of the world ''would'' censor cyberspace. They already do it. Mr Annan may not have heard of it, but the host government for his internet summit in Tunisia has specifically a freedom of speech website established by activist Neila Charchour Hachicha to serve the summit. How's that for ''turning our back'' to the internet?
Mr Annan's bosses and clients not only ''would'' censor the internet, they would censor it as much as they could. The beauty of the internet is that the 'net routes around damage. The old cliche said that the internet would continue to operate in a nuclear holocaust, and it probably would. Sure, Thailand can block a Pulo web site for many in the country but not for Tunisians. Tunis censors can block Yuzzi.org to most Tunisians and summit-goers, but not to us in Thailand. And that is what the United Nations members want to change, and why they are pushing this bogus business of ''American hegemony'' over the internet, and feigning innocence over claims they want to censor information, when all they want to do is hold hands and sing We Are the World.
''The UN isn't a threat to the 'net,'' Mr Annan claimed. Sure: You're from the UN and you're here to help us. But help us do what, exactly?
The Syrian delegate to a summit preparatory meeting complained about all the junk email, known as spam. Houlin Zhao, the former Beijing censor who is now chief of the UN's Telecommunication Standardisation Bureau and thus running for head of the internet, thinks there is too much cybercrime. The delegate from Brazil, which gave us nude Carnival photos, complained there is now too much pornography on the internet. But when a member of Icann tried to speak at the meeting, delegates from Syria, Brazil and China banged their desks to drown him out.
Yes. Spam, cybercrime and porn are internet problems. But the delegates of censorious countries have provided no hint of a plan to fight the problems any more than non-brutish countries. Here's a prediction: If they wrestle control of the internet into some new, bloated, overpaid, under-qualified United Nations committee, they still won't contribute a sliver of an idea on how to attack these problems.
Last week _ last week: Libya jailed a blogger for criticising the government; China shut down the popular, internationally acclaimed pro-democracy, anti-corruption site Microphone, run by Wang Yi, a teacher at China's Chengdu University; Egypt arrested a university student who criticised the government and Islamic extremists who tried to trash a Christian church, and Army commander Gen Sonthi Boonyaratglin supported closing all websites dealing with the southern insurgency except for the one the Army just opened.
Repeat: That is what we know happened in a single week of public actions by governments who, Mr Annan says, want to ''learn to work'' with online citizens so they can ''get their internet policies 'right', and coordinate with each other and with the internet community.''
That doesn't count the anti-internet diatribe by Veerasak Kowsurat, chairman of the House committee on women, children and the elderly, because that was the previous week, as was the praise by PM's Office Minister Suranand Vejjajiva for Chinese media control, broadcast by Radio Thailand.
Mr Zhao and his backers _ he has many _ want to lift backroom control of standards and domain names from the US-backed Icann and take it over. That way, if some government decided it wanted the name bangkokpost.com, for example, it would have UN backing to take it. Under the current system, ignoring governments, Icann guarantees that name to this newspaper, and the Icann system rescued that specific name when it was stolen some years ago. This system not only works well, but has worked well from the first day of the internet almost 40 years ago. It is simply not broken, and there's not a reason in the world to fix it.
But look. Up to now, at least, information is free and you are welcome to delve deeply into this issue. In fact maybe you should; it could be one of the last issues you will be free to investigate. And if you want to help governments to cooperate in website blocking, so that you cannot see web pages that offend the Chinese regime, visit sites that don't meet the standards of the Brazil government, or listen to online music declared distasteful by the Syrian dictatorship, by all means support the UN effort to take over running the internet.
http://archives.mybangkokpost.com/bkkarchives/frontstore/news_detail.html?aid=177204&textcat=General%20News&type=a&key=Who%20controls%20access%20to%20the%20internet?&year=&click_page=1&search_cat=text&from=text_search
~~~
Who Will Rule the Net?
Upcoming UN Summit to Decide Future Control of the Internet
By Jose Rivera
Epoch Times Chicago Staff
Nov 10, 2005
One of the great success stories of our time, the Internet, may soon be in for a major change.
Internet usage continues its global reach, with connected web users crossing cultural and national boundaries to tap the information highway. This expansion and popularity has caused many countries to examine who will control the Internet in the near future.
According to the Nielsen//NetRatings Home & Work Panel, by the summer of 2003 there were 580 million Internet users worldwide. At current growth rates, the Internet is expected to reach 1.21 billion by 2006, and 1.35 billion by 2007. [eTForecasts, Sept 2004]
With many countries using the Internet for development and procedure in government and private infrastructure—like Brazil, which heavily relies on the Internet for its tax collections—the question of Internet governance has become the focus of the upcoming U.N.’s World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).
Recently, government representatives from around the world met in Geneva at a preliminary meeting for the upcoming WSIS Summit, to be held Nov. 16-18 in Tunisia. At issue is control of the web’s “root” servers, which store index information and directories of the entire internet and are maintained by the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a private contractor to the United States Department of Commerce. As the Internet evolves and continues to grow, representatives from countries like Cuba, Iran, and China are objecting to future control by the US, opting instead for UN control.
At the end of preliminary talks in Geneva, a U.K. government and European Union representative made a surprise change of position, deciding not to support U.S. control and instead endorse the idea of international authority of the Internet. David Hendon, director of business relations for the U.K.’s Department of Trade and Industry, proposed assembling an international forum to set policy principles for ICANN and adjudicate complaints.
Martin Selmayr, spokesman for the EU, was quoted in the Washington Post as saying, “…the EU is proposing moving from unilateralism to multilateralism in Internet governance. Public policy principles…issued in the future should be discussed internationally.”
The U.S. is opposed to relinquishing Internet governance to the United Nations. David A. Gross, U.S. ambassador and coordinator of international communications and information policy for the State Department, told the Associated Press that despite EU support, “We will not agree to the U.N. taking over the management of the Internet. Some countries want that. We think that’s unacceptable.
“When the EU’s proposal was read, it was interesting how quickly it was endorsed in large part by countries such as Cuba, Iran, Saudi Arabia and others who have been very clear that they do not believe” in principles of free expression, Gross added.
The U.S. intends to keep all governments and politics out of the Internet’s growth, and preserve free-market development. In June the U.S. announced it would continue oversight of the Internet’s addressing and top-level domain system, even after the end of the current annual contract with ICANN, to keep the Internet secure.
Critics of U.N. control worry over larger, unruly bureaucracies containing countries vying for changes in international Internet policies. There is also the possibility of Internet taxation by the U.N. to build funds to support developing countries obtaining technology, or in the extreme the fragmentation of the Internet through the creation of other “root” servers and domains separate from ICANN control.
Not surprisingly, communist leaders in Beijing are leading proponents of U. N. supervision of the Internet, supporting joint international governance within the U.N. framework. But human rights groups are concerned about countries like China and their involvement in setting future Internet policy. Reporters without Borders, a media-freedom watchdog, says China oversees the most far-reaching Internet censorship and email surveillance anywhere, and is also ‘the world’s biggest prison for cyber-dissidents,’ more than 60 of whom are in jail.
Milton Mueller, Internet expert and author of “Ruling the Root,” told the U.K.’s Guardian, “I can’t see that a council is going to be able to improve the human rights situation.”
With nothing less than control of the Internet and the free flow of information at stake, how long can one country control it all, yet remain responsible to the whole world? The U.S., from the Internet’s public inception, has ruled the evolution of the web with little governmental interference, as noted by its record of non-reversal of any ICANN decisions. What would be the effect of U.N. control?
“I can’t imagine having to convene the governments of the world, or at least some task force, to measure those decisions about how to transfer a domain name from one registrar to another against all the treaties of the world,” Bret Fausett, a member of ICANN’s At-Large Advisory Committee, told internetnews.com. “It’s a level of bureaucracy that straightforward technical management issues don’t need.”
http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/5-11-10/34397.html
~~~
November 9, 2005
ICANN Working to Resolve U.N. Issue
By Jim Wagner
The board of directors at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) wants to hold a special meeting with their governmental members to discuss ways to head off the threat of United Nations (U.N.) intervention.
Vint Cerf, ICANN board chairman stated the board would like to hold a special meeting to discuss the role of Internet governance. He made his request in a letter to Mohamed Sharil Tarmizi, chairman of the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), posted to the ICANN Web site Wednesday.
The ICANN community is scheduled to meet in Vancouver, Canada, Nov. 30 - Dec. 4.
ICANN is fending off growing discontent among foreign countries who are angered by U.S.-centric policies that affect what is essentially an international Internet. Earlier this year, the U.S. reversed its policy to divest itself of veto power over the management of the 13 root servers that house the vast majority of top-level domains, such as .com and .net, to ICANN.
That global opposition has solidified around the U.N.-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and its Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG), which in July outlined four possible directions the world body could take regarding Internet governance.
U.S. officials are opposed to the U.N. taking over management of the Internet.
One of the WGIG recommendations was keeping ICANN intact but expanding the role of the organization's GAC. Cerf's letter to Tarmizi suggests that is exactly what it has in mind to fend off any move by the U.N. to subsume ICANN.
"As you have no doubt noticed, during the current [WSIS] a great deal of attention has been devoted to the role of governments in the process of 'Internet governance,'" Cerf wrote. "Obviously, this discussion directly relates to the role of the [GAC] in ICANN and raises the question of how that role could be strengthened within the existing multi-stakeholder mechanism and made more effective."
One possible way to accomplish this would be through the creation of a governmental supporting organization, which could give government representatives voting power on the ICANN board of directors.
The GAC is one of six non-
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