Fergie's Tech Blog

Bush Administration Control Will Cause Net To Split?

Kieren McCarthy writes in The Register:

The continued control of the Internet's organisational structure by the US government - in particular the Bush administration - could result in the splitting of the Net, one of the leading Arab Internet voices has warned.

CEO of the Multi-lingual Internet Names Consortium (MINC) and member of the recently created international advisory committee for internationalised domain names, Khaled Fattal, made the warning in a letter [.pdf] to the heads of Internet overseeing organisation ICANN.

The US government's "de facto monopolistic control" over the Internet combined with the "serious and growing unpopularity of the Bush administration internationally" could "lead to serious forms of balkanisation", Fattal warned.

The letter was sent soon after the first series of meetings of the ICANN Presidential Advisory Comittee on IDNs at ICANN's meeting in Vancouver last week. That committee hopes to find a solution to the thorny issue of how to make the Internet readily available in languages other than English and those based on the Western alphabet.

posted by Fergie @ 12/05/2005 07:25:00 AM