Internet governance
They work cooperatively from their respective roles to create shared policies and standards that maintain the Internet's global interoperability for the public good.
However, to help ensure interoperability, several key technical and policy aspects of the underlying core infrastructure and the principal namespaces are administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is headquartered in Los Angeles, California.
There has been a long-held dispute over the management of the DNS root zone,[2][3] whose final control fell under the supervision of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce.
[4] The involvement of NTIA started in 1998 and was supposed to be temporary, but it wasn't until April 2014 in an ICANN meeting held in Brazil,[5] partly heated after Snowden revelations,[6] that this situation changed resulting in an important shift of control transitioning administrative duties of the DNS root zones from NTIA to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) during a period that ended in September 2016.
[8] Since WSIS, the term "Internet governance" has been broadened beyond narrow technical concerns to include a wider range of Internet-related policy issues.
[18] During the development of ARPANET, a numbered series of Request for Comments (RFCs) memos documented technical decisions and methods of working as they evolved.
By the end of 1989, Australia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the UK were connected to the Internet, which had grown to contain more than 160,000 hosts.
Traffic is exchanged between these networks, at major interconnection points, in accordance with established Internet standards and commercial agreements.
This function eventually became known as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and as it expanded to include management of the global Domain Name System (DNS) root servers, a small organization grew.
Allocation of IP addresses was delegated to five regional Internet registries (RIRs): After Jon Postel's death in 1998, IANA became part of ICANN, a California nonprofit established in September 1998 by the U.S. government and awarded a contract by the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Since no general agreement existed even on the definition of what comprised Internet governance, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan initiated a Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) to clarify the issues and report before the second part of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis 2005.
They agreed to establish an Internet Governance Forum (IGF), to be convened by the United Nations Secretary General before the end of the second quarter of 2006.
Given the crossborder, decentralized nature of the internet, an enabling environment for media freedom in the digital age requires global multi-stakeholder cooperation and shared respect for human rights.
In broad terms, two different visions have been seen to shape global internet governance debates in recent years: fragmentation versus common principles.
The NETmundial meeting, held in Brazil in 2014, produced a multistakeholder statement the 'internet should continue to be a globally coherent, interconnected, stable, unfragmented, scalable and accessible network-of-networks.'
[40] The UN General Assembly committed itself to multistakeholderism in December 2015 through a resolution extending the WSIS process and IGF mandate for an additional decade.
[43] The annual conferences linked to the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime and meetings of the United Nations Group of Governmental Experts on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security, mandated by the United Nations General Assembly, have deliberated on norms such as protection of critical infrastructure and the application of international law to cyberspace.
In the period 2012–2016, the African Union passed the Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection[44] and the Commonwealth Secretariat adopted the Report of the Working Group of Experts on Cybercrime.
A 2019 poll by Safety Monitor shows that 13 percent of people aged 15 and above have been victims of cybercrimes such as identity fraud, hacking, and cyberbullying in the Netherlands.
This is in a bid to make the UK the safest place to use the internet in the world and curb the damaging effect of harmful content shared online, including child pornography.
When the directors' posts which had previously been elected by the "at-large" community of Internet users were abolished, some feared that ICANN would become illegitimate and its qualifications questionable, due to the fact that it was now losing the aspect of being a neutral governing body.
[57] One controversial proposal to this effect, resulting from a September 2011 summit among India, Brazil, and South Africa (IBSA), would seek to move Internet governance into a "UN Committee on Internet-Related Policy" (UN-CIRP).
[71] On 1 October 2016 ICANN ended its contract with the United States Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).
As Stephen D. Crocker, ICANN Board Chair from 2011 to 2017, said in a news release at the time of the contract expiration, “This community validated the multistakeholder model of Internet governance.
It has shown that a governance model defined by the inclusion of all voices, including business, academics, technical experts, civil society, governments and many others is the best way to assure that the Internet of tomorrow remains as free, open, and accessible as the Internet of today.”[74] The concerted effort began in March 2014, when NTIA asked ICANN to convene the global multistakeholder community – made up of private-sector representatives, technical experts, academics, civil society, governments and individual Internet end users – to come together and create a proposal to replace NTIA’s historic stewardship role.
Stakeholders spent more than 26,000 working hours on the proposal, exchanged more than 33,000 messages on mailing lists, held more than 600 meetings and calls and incurred millions of dollars of legal fees to develop the plan, which the community completed, and ICANN submitted to NTIA for review in March 2016.
Senator Ted Cruz introduced the “Protecting Internet Freedom Act,” a bill to prohibit NTIA from allowing the IANA functions contract to lapse unless authorized by Congress.
[78] On 9 June 2016, NTIA, after working with other U.S. Government agencies to conduct a thorough review, announced that the proposal package developed by the global Internet multistakeholder community met the criteria it had outlined in March 2014.
Governments often justify internet shutdowns on grounds of public safety, prevention of mass hysteria, hate speech, fake news, national security, and sometimes for transparency of an ongoing electioneering process.
According to reports by Access Now, a non-profit digital right group, 25 countries across the globe experienced government-induced internet shutdown 196 times in 2018.
