Newsweek is currently running a story in its international edition on the current state of Internet Governance. Don’t rush to read it in the hope of fresh news or insightful comments. This is targeted at a general audience and is thus subject to the generalizations, counter-truths, half truths and politically correct arguments.

A few pearls:

The Open Root Servers Network is depicted as an “anti-american” initiative. Of course, Newsweek failed to mention that Paul Vixie, an American citizen, was running one of these root servers. This would not have helped making the case. And, as is usual these days, critizing, or questioning the rethorics of, an administration is equivalent to being the enemy of a country.

In the same vein, Newsweek considers it is unwise from the French and German governments to pour money into an European IT research project whose goal is to develop a search engine technology. On the other hand, Newsweek does consider that the USG funding of Arpanet and subsequent research that helped develop the Internet is OK. To summarize: US funding of research is fine, but Europeans should not do the same.

Newsweek should have called this article “Internet governance for dummies”. Unfortunately, after reading it, one is still a dummy.