In early November, China held its 10th World Internet Conference (WIC) to much fanfare. Global, really? This event was in fact Chinese President Xi Jinping’s response to the 18th edition of the Internet Governance Forum, which had taken place a month earlier in Japan under the auspices of the United Nations. These two international meetings say a lot about the fight for the future of the “network of networks”. And the age-old question arises: Who owns the Internet and who governs it? The answer is simple: nobody! Nobody owns it.
Internet governance, i.e. the definition of its main technological directions, works like global co-ownership, but… without an owner. There are only the stakeholders, namely governments, the private sector (businesses), civil society (including Internet users) and technical and academic communities, all of which should have a say in the “multi-stakeholder” management of the Internet and its protocols and their developments .
At a time when high speed, mobility, cybercrime, blockchain and even artificial intelligence (AI) are exploding, agreement at the international level is becoming increasingly important. The Internet, whose mission is to be universal and open, is today on the verge of implosion. And the leader of the network, the American company Icann (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), is more controversial than ever. China is pushing to completely change internet governance to strengthen the role of states.
Technical constraints versus political pressure
Icann is a nonprofit chartered public utility founded a quarter century ago in California. It is she who assigns and manages the addresses and domain names (the “.com”, “.net”, “.org”, “.fr”, “.info”, etc.) using only thirteen servers. Computers, called “roots,” spread across the planet. Another American company, Verisign, has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange for 25 years. It operates two important servers for ICANN (specifically “.com” and “.net”). To ensure “multi-stakeholder governance” of the Internet, ICANN typically holds three annual meetings and works according to a so-called “bottom-up” model, which consists of bringing together the international Internet community (technicians, academics, organizations , governments, etc.) to consult .) before making any decision.
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