GENEVA -- The United States was isolated on September 30 as it sought to defend its monopoly over regulation of the Internet against the European Union and other countries that are demanding a share of the action, officials said.
"On the issue of Internet governance, very big differences of opinion exist," the head of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) said following a preparatory meeting for the second stage of the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunisia.
"The United States insist that the present status quo should be maintained. Other countries share the view that it should be evolving."
Domain names on the Internet - such as com, org or int - are regulated by several private companies in the United States, the most important of which is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which comes under direct government supervision.
"As the Internet has become an infrastructure for all people, all nations want to have a sense of ownership," said ITU Secretary-General Yoshio Utsumi. "And if the headquarters is dominated by one company or one country, then you may not have this sense of ownership. So, many countries are saying that we need democratization or internationalization of the headquarters."
Utsumi said that "in a radical shift of position", the European Union had called for an international forum that would include both public and private sectors.
Utsumi said that function could be carried out by the ITU if countries agreed.
The Geneva-based Telecommunication Union, the world's oldest international body, is a branch of the United Nations, in which governments and the private sector coordinate global telecom networks and services.
But according to Utsumi, the United States made it clear that it would "under no circumstances ... take any action that would adversely impact the security and stability of the domain name system".
The dispute made it unlikely that the summit preparatory committee would be able to conclude its work as planned on September 30, said committee president Janis Karklins.
This meant, he said, that another preparatory session would have to be held in the three days preceding the meeting November 16 to 18, which is scheduled to be attended by about 40 heads of state.
If there is no agreement, some countries might be tempted to create their own domain name system to get around the American system, which for all the criticism directed against it allows all the world's computers to be interconnected.
"If there is a new domain name system, the question would be whether it is interoperable with the existing system," Karklins said. "If it is not the case, the value of the Internet would decrease."
