governing the net

The ruling party's power-struggle is a cloud over South Africa's political future 

Felix Cohen introduces openDemocracy's new-look site, and invites your contributions on how to improve it.

An Amnesty International report on leading companies' complicity with China's internet censorship is the latest stage in a vital campaign, says Becky Hogge.

…and will it tell George W Bush? Andrew Brown reveals why Google is resisting a White House subpoena to reveal random search data, when its rivals MSN, Yahoo! et al, have complied.

Dismissing the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society makes for good headlines but misses the point, says Bill Thompson

The debate about who governs the internet will dominate the World Summit on the Information Society meeting in Tunis this week – but the world’s web users have more important things on their mind, says Becky Hogge.

Is the world wide web evolving, dying or merely pining for the fjords? A young web developer takes issue with Bill Thompson’s call to dump the web. Eavesdrop on the techies slugging it out over HTML, distributed processing, < IMG > tags and illiterate waiters. The future of your desktop is at stake.

Bill Thompson studied computer science, built his first site in 1994, attended the first international web conference later that year with Tim Berners-Lee, created the Guardian’s first website and has worked with openDemocracy since its first version. But he has a deep, dark secret. He thinks the web sucks. Not just individual sites, but the whole web edifice. He explains why he wants to cure the addiction to HTML and do online publishing properly.

The World Summit on the Information Society venue was bland, the rhetoric cloudy, the chocolates consoling – but ideas and energy flowed around the fringes.

The appropriate use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) could make a vast contribution to solving the problems of development and democracy. But to realise this potential, a global conversation is needed to match the global nature of economic, social and environmental challenges.

The UN’s World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva is intended to create ways of bridging the global ‘digital divide’. But will its political tensions and complex agenda make it less of an “internet-Kyoto” and more of an arid talk shop?

The leading ICANN activist Esther Dyson reflects on the domain name organisation’s recent dispute over the future direction of Internet governance.

The media saturates, drenches, overflows our lives: an endless torrent of words, images, sounds. This is not the “information age”, a mere channel to life, says openDemocracy’s North Americas editor, but life itself. How do people make sense of the onrush without being submerged by it?

The debate about governing the internet is intensifying. Does the new medium need new forms of representation, or simply an application of “real world” norms? If the former, how can the public interest be best secured? The net’s governing body, ICANN, is meeting this weekend to thrash out the issues. A representative of the Markle Foundation sets out the principles he, and other independent experts, believe should guide it.

In Issue 3 of openDemocracy, we published an interview with Esther Dyson on governing the Internet. She described how ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) was created - and called for global parties to keep it open and accountable. Our members had the opportunity to put their questions to her in our debate section. Just back from a meeting of the At-Large Study Committee of ICANN, she responds to six of them, dealing with issues of both process and principle. She finishes by examining notions of global democracy.

The net is rule-governed space as well as dynamic technology and business medium. But who wrote the rules? An ICANN pioneer tells openDemocracy the story of how the net community harnessed political imagination to create its own forms of governance, and asks: can a global civil society now emerge, with political parties to help make that governance accountable?