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TOUTES LES RUBRIQUES

L’UE salue la volonté américaine d’ouvrir la gouvernance d’Internet

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Publié 02 octobre 2009
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Internet governance
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Les Etats-Unis ont annoncé vouloir renoncer à leurs pouvoirs unilatéraux de supervision de l’ICANN, l’organisme responsable de la gestion des adresses Internet dans le monde. Cette décision a été chaudement saluée par l’UE et les groupes de défense du web.

Washington announced "its commitment to a multi-stakeholder, private sector-led, bottom-up policy development model for the domain name and addressing system (DNS)," according to a statement co-signed by the US Communication and Information Administration and ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

"A private coordinating process, the outcomes of which reflect the public interest, is best able to flexibly meet the changing needs of the Internet and of Internet users," continues the statement.

In practical terms, this means that "the political responsibility of the Internet moves from the US to the global community," ICANN's Massimiliano Minisci told EurActiv.

Since ICANN was established in 1998, the United States has been the sole supervisor of the organisation's policy decisions, such as dispute resolution over domain name ownership or the introduction of top-level domains. 

With the new agreement, the supervision power will be moved to the so-called ICANN community, which includes governments, companies, civil society and technical experts from all over the world.

The move follows strong international pressure on the United States to loosen its control over ICANN. The European Commission has been very vocal in recent months in campaigning for an overhaul of Internet governance (see 'Background').

Réactions : 

"I welcome the US administration's decision to adapt ICANN's key role in Internet governance to the realities of the 21st century and of a globalised world," EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding said in a statement. 

"Internet users worldwide can now anticipate that ICANN's decisions on domain names and addresses will be more independent and more accountable, taking into account everyone's interests. External review panels will periodically evaluate ICANN's performance," she added.

The Swedish EU Presidency hailed the announcement as "an important moment in the process towards the increased internationalisation of ICANN's coordination and management of the Internet DNS".

ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom stressed that the new situation shows that "we're now mature enough to move on to the next phase of our global development. So it's a real exciting time for us to enter a whole new level as an organisation".

Vint Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet, underlined that the deal "fulfills a long-standing objective of the original formation of ICANN: to create an organisation that can serve the world's interest in a robust, reliable and interoperable Internet".

The Internet Society, a non-profit organisation working for ensuring the "open" development of the Internet, welcomed the announcement. "We believe the new framework properly emphasises ICANN's obligation to act in the public interest as the steward of a vital shared global resource," reads a statement.

With this new situation "the world Internet community, and Russians in particular, will have the opportunity to have a bigger impact when defining the policies for development of the Internet, while keeping balanced all participating parties' interests," said Andrei Kolesnikov, president of the centre coordinating the .ru domain.

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Contexte : 

Like telephones, the Internet relies on numbers which identify computers and allow them to connect to one another. This identification process is coordinated at global level by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

ICANN was established as a not-for-profit corporation in 1998 with the backing of Washington. The agreement with the US administration has been renewed every three years up to the last renewal, signed in 2006. 

ICANN is responsible for defining Internet domains, such as .com or .eu and for managing the Internet core directory.

The EU and other countries around the world have acknowledged the success story of the US-born Internet, but have increasingly challenged the United States' sole control of Internet governance.

In a speech given last May, Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding urged the Obama administration to embark on ambitious reform of Internet governance (EurActiv 06/05/09).

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