The UN could play a role in regulating the Internet in the future Talks in Dubai this December could bring radical changes to the Net and who controls it. Some want a body like the UN to rein in the Net\'s freewheeling nature. Calls for a more regulated Internet are nothing new. But they have grown louder as the \"network of networks\" continues to connect people socially and politically - more than two billion and rising - while at the same time generating billions of dollars of revenue through electronic commerce.
Proposals to place the Internet under the control of a global authority, like the International Telecommunication Union, a UN body, have resurfaced ahead of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in December.
The conference in Dubai will discuss and likely revise many of the current international telecommunications regulations, which were originally agreed in 1988 - at a time when the Net was largely unknown outside of academia.
Since then, the Internet has become increasingly pervasive - and powerful.
For instance, Net observers say the Arab Spring would have failed to achieve the scale it did without Facebook and other social media - hundreds of thousands of unhappy citizens apparently agreed to protest and organised their demonstrations via these interactive platforms.
\"The underlying fact is that the Internet provides unprecedented access to information and allows people to freely exchange information,\" says Markus Kummer, vice president of public policy at the Geneva-based Internet Society, which coordinates the committees and task forces that maintain the Internet\'s core protocols. \"It doesn\'t go down well with some countries that value national sovereignty higher than the free flow of information and knowledge.\"
Russia, China and Iran are among the countries that would like to see greater Internet controls, either in the form of new regulations or a global authority or both.
They say more regulation is needed to deal with issues such as spam and cybercrime.
But critics argue their real reasons are to control the packets of information that move across their borders.
\"The fact is many governments are not comfortable with the existing governance arrangements, which are bottom-up, with a very flat structure and no one in charge,\" says Kummer. \"That is the opposite of what governments, even in democratic societies, are used to. So there is underlying tension.\"
That\'s how Adam Peake sees it, too. Peake, an executive research fellow at the Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM) in Tokyo, points to a push by a number of governments for greater Net regulation.
\"Some countries are looking to WCIT to reign in some of the freedoms that the Internet has given us, like freedom of speech and freedom to innovate with applications that undercut traditional telecommunications models,\" says Peake. \"They want control over content and business models.\"
A number of countries would like to see the ITU become a global Internet watchdog of sorts or at least extend its authority to include Internet Protocol (IP) communications.
Founded in 1865 to establish international telegraph standard, the ITU became a part of the UN in 1947. It has never seen its authority extend beyond switched telephone networks and international radio. The Internet has happened completely outside of its control.
While struggling to officially deny that his organisation is interested in becoming an Internet regulator, ITU Secretary General Hamadoun Touré took pains in a recent speech at Columbia University to narrowly define today\'s understanding of Internet governance as concerning only domain names and addresses.
\"These are issues that we\'re not talking about at all,\" Touré said. \"We\'re not pushing that - we don\'t need to.\"
But the ITU could flex its muscle in cyberspace in many other ways, according to Peake.
\"There are proposals for ITU recommendations to become nationally mandated,\" Peake says. \"That would give the agency massive power.\"
Many countries, including the United States, want the Internet to retain its open and innovative nature.
They made that point clear during the first and second World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), which took place in Geneva and Tunis in 2003 and 2005, respectively.
Most Internet businesses feel the same way.
WSIS involved all the stakeholders - governments, industry, civil society and the traditional Internet technology and academic groups - and established the Internet Governance Forum as a platform for these groups to meet and exchange views on a regular basis, according to Paul Rendek with the regional Internet registry RIPE and a participant in the talks.
\"We are now consulted by governments and other stakeholders and see much more acceptance to the multi-stakeholder model. Everyone has a place in the Internet advisory talks. And that gives us a road to a stable Internet,\" says Rendek.
But as with the WSIS events and the many smaller conferences and forums held since then, the Dubai meeting is likely to see certain parties butting heads, possibly even harder than in the past.
\"It\'s inevitable that governments are more interested in the Internet these days - it\'s the backbone of globalisation,\" Rendek says. \"Regardless of what happens in Dubai, Internet governance is an issue that isn\'t going away.
The annual conference organised by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a UN agency responsible for regulating international telecommunications, never receives much attention.
But this year\'s ITU conference received a lot. Internet governance and regulation was the main topic at the talks.
Some of the 193 participating countries want the ITU\'s influence to expand to include the Internet. Since 1988, an internationally recognised agreement (ITR) has only covered traditional phones.
Countries including Russia, China and some Arab nations wanted a revision of the agreement to allow the UN to intervene on Internet traffic.
One of the main arguments for those calling for the Internet to be brought under the ITU\'s governance is that most phone calls are routed via the Internet today. \"We cannot speak of international telecommunication without considering Internet telephone and telecommunication,\" a representative from Bahrain said.
Bahrain is one of the countries that reacted very strongly against bloggers and critics of the administration, according to US-based NGO Freedom House.
Proposals that countries like China, Russia and the United Arab Emirates wanted to push though were already published in a document on a WCITLeaks page online.
The document has been criticised as a free pass for state censorship as it allows for anyone publishing content on the Web to have to pay for it. Also, it would also undermine net neutrality by permitting different levels of connection quality.
Russia also proposed \"national Internet segments\" or national intranets, which could be controlled by governments. Iran is working on developing its own \"Halal Internet.\"
Almost the entire West fought against attempts to push through an ITR, which would include the Internet. The word \"Internet\" does not appear in the new ITR, but there are some general statements on Internet traffic, which leave room for interpretation. Critics believe that the new guidelines will be interpreted by some countries to allow for government control.
Internet expert Wolfgang Kleinwächter said he thinks that this conference was more about politics than technology.
\"More and more negotiations are a kind of political shadow boxing, which is less about the practical implications and more about the politics,\" Kleinwachter told German IT news site Heise Online.
At the end of the conference, the ITU\'s secretary general spoke of \"many winners.\" The new ITR stipulates transparency on roaming charges.
The document declared was passed despite the protests of some delegates. Only 89 of the 193 countries at the conference signed the agreement. And big countries like Germany and the United States did not.
So for now, things will remain as they were in the free world, and in non-democratic countries, Internet users will continue to be controlled and critical bloggers monitored.