A year after the United States narrowly avoided a bruising row with the rest of the world over control of the Internet, round two of talks on the Web's future opened here Monday in a UN-sponsored Forum on Internet Governance.
Over 1,000 Internet experts from 90 countries are participating in the first-ever forum, established by the Tunis World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in September 2005 as a compromise solution to enable talks on Internet oversight to continue.
"There are plenty of meetings between the Internet community, but they meet among themselves to discuss technical questions," said Markus Kummer, head of the UN Secretariat of the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG).
"Here we have a broader debate, you have all the stakeholders sitting together: governments, private sector, the academic and technical community," he told AFP.
In Tunis, countries such as China and Iran objected to having the Internet's technical root managed by the California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit organisation under license from the US Department of Commerce. But Washington resisted attempts to modify the existing framework, warning that regimes that do not allow freedom of speech could gain leverage over the Internet.
The issue is expected to crop up again at the forum in the southern Athens suburb of Vouliagmeni, which aims to improve understanding of how the Internet can be used to its full potential, but is not a decision-making body. "Nobody ignores the fact that there are challenges," Kummer said. "There is a need for international co-operation, and this forum reflects this need."
"Today the forum enters uncharted waters," Nitin Desai, special advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Internet governance said in an address.
"(The Internet) has become too important ... for governments not to take an interest. "The challenge therefore is to bring two cultures together: the non-governmental Internet community ... and the more formal, structured world of governments and intergovernmental organisations," Desai said, reading a message from Annan.
Online security, cybercrime, access for non-English users, censorship and the battle against the global scourge of spam - electronic junk mail - are among topics also scheduled to be raised in Athens during brainstorming workshops and open sessions between October 30 and November 2.
The UN-sponsored forum brings together state representatives, regulatory authorities and major tech industry players such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, AT and T, Sun Microsystems, Fujitsu and Ericsson.
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