2023-11-26 16:00:24
At the beginning of November, China held its 10th with great fanfare.e World Internet Conference (WIC). Global, really? This event was in fact the response of Chinese President Xi Jinping to the 18e edition of the Internet Governance Forum which had taken place a month earlier in Japan, under the auspices of the United Nations. These two international meetings say a lot about the battle taking place around the future of the “network of networks”. And the age-old question arises: who owns the Internet and who governs it? The answer is simple: no one! No one owns it.
Internet governance, in other words the definition of its major technological orientations, functions like a global co-ownership but… without owners. There are only the stakeholders that are governments, the private sector (businesses), civil society (including Internet users) and technical and academic communities, all supposed to have a say in the “multi-stakeholder” management of the Internet. , its protocols and their developments.
At a time when very high speed, mobility, cybercrime, blockchain and even artificial intelligence (AI) are exploding, reaching an agreement at the international level is becoming crucial. The Internet, whose vocation is to be universal and open, is today on the verge of implosion. And the leader of the network, the American company Icann (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), is more contested than ever. China is pushing to completely change Internet governance in order to strengthen the role of states.
Technical constraints versus political pressures
A non-profit and recognized public utility, Icann was born a quarter of a century ago in California. It is she who assigns and administers the addresses and domain names (the “.com”, “.net”, “.org”, “.fr”, “.info”, etc.), using only thirteen servers. computing, known as “roots”, distributed across the planet. Another American company, Verisign, has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange for twenty-five years. It operates two important servers for ICANN (“. com” and “. net”, in particular). To ensure “multi-stakeholder governance” of the Internet, ICANN generally holds three annual meetings and operates according to a so-called “bottom-up” model (bottom up), which consists of consulting the international Internet community (technicians, academics, organizations, governments, etc.) before any decision.
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