When elephants make love, the grass gets trampled
Steve Ryan, a barrister who attended the IGF, asks whether the IGF was a success. His answer, he says, “hinges on whether ideals broadly held by the U.S. Internet community were furthered”. Ryan looks at “control issues”, these being government control of the internet. Here he also quotes the outgoing Secretary General of the ITU, Yoshio Utsumi of Japan who commented on the “continued lack of consensus” regarding Internet governance, stating it “borders on arrogance” to believe national governments and the ITU should not have the controlling role in Internet governance. Then Ryan looks at the “venerable founders”, Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf, the former citing “two key ways the Internet succeeded: first, that it was removed from central control through its open architecture; and second, it was fueled by the active cooperative participation by the research community.” Then “Cerf warned the assembled government representatives that the desire for internationalized domain names (IDNs) that moved beyond Latin characters A to Z and 1 to 9 was indeed inevitable, but he did not minimize the challenge this worthy goal posed to global interoperability.” Towards the end of the article Ryan writes “There is a palpable concern in the Internet community that ICANN will be badly harmed by Cerf’s being ‘termed out’ and having to leave ICANN’s board, which he has chaired with distinction. ICANN’s more than occasional political tone deafness will not be enhanced by losing its most deft and respected spokesman.”
http://news.com.com/2010-1028_3-6134252.html