World wants more say in control of World Wide Web

0 Comments | USA TODAY, November, 2005 | by Michelle Kessler

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Bush administration and the U.S. tech industry are teaming to take on the rest of the world in a fight about who controls the technical underpinnings of the Internet.

Right now, a U.S.-based group does. But countries from Chile to China think they should have more say.

The debate is pretty geeky. But if the issues are not resolved, the Net could stop working smoothly. And the fight -- which will come to a head at a United Nations conference this week -- could become a foreign policy problem far outside the virtual world.

Already, "there is a lot of mistrust," says Robert Shaw, policy adviser for the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N.-affiliated group that advocates more international control of the Net.

"There need to...