The UN and the internet

The laptop on which I’m working tells me that it has sent 7,392 email messages to date, and if I knew how to reach its innermost parts it would probably provide a rather embarrassing list of every website it has ever visited on my behalf as well. Like most internet users, I have absolutely no idea how any of that traffic actually happened. I have a fantasy that it involves satellites in space and bunkers deep underground, full of scary professors and beautiful girls in lycra spacesuits dancing attendance on giant computers; and I sometimes wonder whether my cyber-correspondence is being monitored for key words (‘jihad’ perhaps, or ‘Galloway bank account’) at GCHQ Cheltenham or Langley, Virginia.

But on the whole I am content to use this almost free conduit of information, commerce, entertainment and personal contact without knowing anything at all about how it works or who controls it. There must be at least 17,000 people who take a different view, however, for that is the number who converged on Tunis last week for the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society. Many of them — representing smaller nations or ‘civil society’ pressure groups and NGOs — were driven by a fervent desire to see control of the internet removed from what they perceive to be the evil hand of the US government and placed instead under a new body modelled on the International Telecommunication Union, the UN agency which efficiently co-ordinates the world’s telephone networks.

That sounds like a jolly sensible proposition, you may be thinking, if the internet really is controlled by Rumsfeld and Cheney and those other goons who yank George W. Bush’s strings. Well, not exactly. The body which allocates domain names (the suffixes such as ‘.uk’, which form the architecture of the system) and the numerical codes behind them is itself a not-for-profit, non-governmental organisation, called Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) and based in Marina del Rey, California.