A world divided over control of the Internet

E-Brief News reports that the meeting has teamed the European Union and heavyweight countries like China, Iran and Russia against the US, with the EU bloc calling for Internet governance to be handed over to the UN\'s International Telecommunications Union. Supporting the US are Australia, the UK and Latin American countries such as Argentina, Chile and Peru. This debacle over who should manage Internet routing and addressing could derail November\'s UN World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia. AustralianIT reports that the preparatory meeting was disrupted after Chinese and Brazilian delegates started banging on the table to signal their objections to a speaker representing corporate interests. Business leaders were gagged from speaking at many of the summit\'s committees, with delegates from developing nations insisting only government representatives be allowed to speak. Full AustralianIT report

Political unease with the US approach, symbolised by opposition to the war in Iraq, has spilled over into the technical discussions. Delegates said the EU and developing nations wanted to send a signal to America that it could not run things alone. The International Herald Tribune reports that opposition to Washington\'s continued dominance of the Internet was illustrated by a statement released by the Brazilian delegation to the talks. \'On Internet governance, three words tend to come to mind: lack of legitimacy. In our digital world, only one nation decides for all of us.\' In its new proposal, the EU said the new body could set guidelines on who gets control of what Internet address – the main mechanism for finding information across the global network – and could play a role in helping to set up a system for resolving disputes. Full International Herald Tribune report

But Washington is showing no signs of budging. Members of the US House of Representatives say the US should resist international pressure to give up authority over key Internet functions amid a mounting feud over the issue. CNET News reports that in a letter to Commerce and State Department officials, the lawmakers said the Bush administration should retain strong oversight over the Internet domain name system, specifically the root servers that guide traffic to huge databases containing addresses for all the top-level domains, such as .com, .edu, and the country code domains like .uk and .jp. Officials on both sides are set to meet about the issue next month at the UN-sponsored summit in Tunisia. Full CNET News report