This week’s conference of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Dubai failed to produce an agreement on country-level Internet governance. After heated debates, the conference passed a vague-worded resolution calling on the ITU to play a more active role in the development of the Internet.
Russia and China suggested giving partial control over the allocation of web addresses either to ITU member states or to a specialized agency under the aegis of the United Nations. At present, this is the exclusive monopoly of the United States it exercises through the U.S.-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names (ICANN) controlled by the U.S. Commerce Department.
The United States is visibly unprepared to share this monopoly with anybody else. All main IT resources, servers and transfer protocols are located in the United States, notes Russian IT expert Anton Korobkov-Zemlyansky.
Read more at The Voice of Russia.