The Hindu Business Line : India to seek dilution of US role in Net governance

INDIA will push for dilution of control of US-supported Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) over global Internet governance. It will also suggest setting up an inter-government organisation to co-ordinate issues related to Internet and IP-based services at the UN-sponsored Working Group on Internet Governance meeting to be held in Geneva between February 14 and 16.

Currently, most Internet related activities such as domain name registration and Internet address registrationare primarily controlled by ICANN, a private organisation working under an MoU with the US Government.

"India, among the developing countries, is not at ease with the limited influence of governments in ICANN. ICANN's incorporation in the USimplicitly means it will always be subject to the US law. It is believed that this shall introduce an asymmetric role of the US Government vis-à-vis other governments," according to a position paper by the Department of Telecom for the working group.

The paper adds that Internet governance includes collective rules, policies, standards and procedures that are consistent with the sovereign rights of the states. "At present, there is little or no role of governments in these multifarious decision processes. We are of the opinion that the Internet should be governed by an inter-governmental, multilateral, multi-stakeholder international body"

The working group was set up by the United Nations to ensure a mechanism for full and active participation of governments on Internet governance by 2005.

India will also object to the IP address allocation mechanism deployed by ICANN on the grounds that it was leading to huge routing tables, leaving fewer resources for traffic. "It is proposed that allocation of IP addresses should be country-based, taking into account the country's population, level of development and potential. This may facilitate simple and efficient routing, monitoring and policy enforcement," the paper said.

India will also seek decentralisation of the location of root servers. Currently, there are 13 root servers, out of which 10 are in the US, two in Europe and one in Japan. This is not conducive for optimal use of Internet resources.

"To obviate these shortcomings, India will recommend that root servers should be placed region wise rather than concentrated in one region," said the position paper.

To tackle Internet threats such as virus, spam, cyber crimes and hacking, India will suggest that governments be advised to enact suitable IT Acts to address these issues in consistency with their legal provisions in a time-bound manner.

The country will also push for domain name registration in local languages. "We are of the opinion that for citizens to access information through ubiquitous ways through the Internet, domain name in Roman script is a big impediment and we, therefore, feel a strong need for the multilingual domain name registration."

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