The United States refuses to relinquish its role as the Internet"s principal traffic policeman, rejecting calls in a United Nations meeting for a U.N. body to take over, a top U.S. official said Thursday.
"We will not agree to the U.N. taking over the management of the Internet," said Ambassador David Gross, the U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy at the State Department. "Some countries want that. We think that"s unacceptable."
Internet governance has historically been the role of the United States, because it created the original system and funded much of the its early development.
One proposal that countries have been discussing would wrest control of domain names from the U.S.-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, and place it with an intergovernmental group, possibly under the United Nations.