U.S. views on norms and structures for Internet governance.

• Author: Crook, John R.

In an April 2008 speech to the American Bar Association, Richard Beaird, a Department of State official responsible for international communications and information policy, discussed U.S. perspectives on Internet governance. (1) Excerpts follow:

I would like to order my remarks around three principal benchmarks:

1. the original vision and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU);

2. the World Summit on the Information Society; and

3. the emergence of cybersecurity as a policy driver.

   In so doing, I hope to support the central thesis of this presentation: that despite considerable economic and technological change, policy debate, and different national agendas, existing international organizations and practices have adapted to the changing Internet environment, and in so doing, they have ultimately supported the resilience of the original U.S. Internet governance vision.

   There are presently over 1 billion Internet users. Nothing in history matches the expansion of the Internet as a global medium of communications, information storing, retrieval and sharing....

   [Beaird here reviewed the origins of the Internet, and the initial stages of its development.]

   From the beginning the U.S. Government was opposed to a "monolithic structure for Internet governance." Instead, the government sought "to create mechanisms to solve a few, primarily technical (albeit critical) questions about administration of Internet names and numbers." The government's goals have also remained remarkably constant from the dawn of that policy formulation in the late 1990s:

1. ensure the stability of the Internet;

2. support competition and consumer choice;

3. rely on private sector to perform the technical management of the Internet; and

4. ensure international input in decision making.

   [Beaird then discussed the evolving role of the International Telecommunications Union regarding the Internet, and the 2003 and 2005 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). (2)]

   The United States issued its Four Principles on the Internet's Domain Name and Addressing Systems on June 30, 2005. These Four Principles are the Administration's fundamental position with respect to Internet governance.... In summary the Four Principles are:

   * The United States government intends to preserve the security and stability of the Internet's domain name and addressing system (DNS).

   * Governments have legitimate interest in the management of their country code and top level domains (ccTLD).

   * [The...