According to this report by Kieren Mc Carthy, the US government will keep its oversight on the DNS root zone. Apparently, the EU has received a strong message from the US Department of State which frightened some member states. As a result, they surrended to the US proposal.

At WSIS last night,  the minimal agreement reached says that a Internet governance Forum will be established within 5 years. This forum will not have any oversight function. ICANN will fundamentally remain how it is today, ie under contract with the US Department of Commerce.

There may be some changes within the Government Advisory Committee of ICANN, but nothing fundamental.

The question now is if all this UN/ITU/Unesco circus was necessary to come up with such a small conclusion. They could as well have used the money  to fund the summit and its parrallel meetings to effectively address the digital divide.

Tricia Drakes and Michael Palage have posted a proposal to solve one of the issues that has repeatedly been mentioned during the WSIS consultations. Make countries find it awkward that changes to their ccTLD in the root zone file has to be approved by the US DoC.

While this proposal will doubtlessly address some of the concerns, it does not yet solve the issue with gTLDs, nor does it address the perspective of an real, independent regulatory agency for names and numbers.

A lot of discussions surrounding WSIS and ICANN focus on the oversight function of the US government. Hans Klein’s recent paper sheds a good light on the different  contracts between ICANN and the USG. However, Klein does not discuss how legitimate these contracts are.

Any undergraduate law student knows that one party can only sell, rent or otherwise grant rights to goods and services it personnally owns. So the question is fundamentally: does the US own the Internet ? Surely, the USG owns the US military network, as well as the federal and possibly the academic. But the Internet is a network of networks. Can the USG impose its oversight on networks it does not own ?   Based on this hypothesis, the  contracts between the DoC and ICANN could only apply to the USG networks. Extending these contracts to any network directly or indirectly connected to the US administration ones would be a gross legal mis-conception, especially outside the US, as US law is not applicable elsewhere in the world.

Saying that the US owns the Internet because it financed part of its development would be like pretending that the EU should have oversight on each and any GSM telephone network in the world because the standards were developed with EU research money, or that the Finnish governement holds a right on every installation of Linux because it was developed by a Finnish student on the Helsinki university computers.

Unfortunately, neither the ICANN board, nor the staff have ever questioned how legitimate these contracts are and if they should not be considered void by design, because the other party has no right to contract on a service it does not own.

Just wanted to point out to two articles which explain with simple words and concepts what the current ussues of Internet governance are.
 
One is by Andy Oram on O’Reilly. The other is by Juan Sanchez on ReasonOnline. I praise these guys for explaing complicated issues while not oversimplyfing them.