However, to highlight how poisoned the situation has become – along with the political hypocrisy surrounding internet governance the decision by NTIA was severely criticised by many American politicians on the right, who want America to be able to retain international control over these aspects of the internet, while, at the same time, they object to any government control by other governments in international internet affairs.
This attitude of there being one role for the USA and one for the rest of the world bothers many countries around the globe.
ICANN needs fostering
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If the ICANN decision is in fact taken up then the immediate next step will have to be ensuring its ongoing independence. But it will be equally important to ensure a viable independent financial model for the organisation, and to establish that the organisation is strong enough to withstand the political interference it can expect will happen. Also, at this stage ICANN is far from being a democratic organisation and this needs to be resolved quickly so that it can gain true international credibility.
However, the ICANN decision will do little for the overall issue of internet governance. Because of its specifically technical focus it will not be able to play a larger role in the other issues of internet governance.
The role of the international community
So how do we address the broader aspects of internet governance? Again a lot of grandstanding here, with some countries claiming that not only is there no role for governments – there is also no role for international organisations controlled by their governments.
What might be forgotten is that it was the UN that addressed some of the issues in the first instance (Tunis Declaration 2005), and through them independent voluntary organisations based on multi-stakeholder participation were established – such as World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), with its many voluntary working groups, and the Internet Governance Forum (IGF).
While these bodies do not have any formal powers they and their summits have been instrumental in keeping the internet as free as possible, simply by ensuring that people from different countries, cultures, religions and social and economic circumstances keep talking to each other, addressing and discussing the many soft internet governance issues, and making common-sense suggestions that so far have been largely followed up by most (democratic) governments.
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Internet has become a key political and commercial issue
The trouble now is that we cannot maintain the status quo that has been established by these organisations so far. The internet has become a far too important political development and, despite what is being said, governments increasingly want to control internet governance. It is too easy to say that this can be nicely divided between national issues – which can be governed by local governments – and international governance issues – which should be left alone. Security, privacy, piracy and terrorism know no borders and international governance of these issues can be left neither in the hands of 220 individual countries nor in the hands of the engineering internet community.
Many international issues are interwoven with commercial issues supported by connected devices, big data and data analytics and they will increasingly cross borders, and how are we going to handle this?
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