Last semester I got into it with someone over this. They think the US has too much control over the internet, bla bla bla, it should be "internationalized," etc. I'm like wait, we build it into what it is today, because of our good ideas and our resources, and so, to level the playing field, we hand it over to some international organization to manage?? And we're not talking about the government handing it over... we're talking about the private and educational institutions that have done the majority of the work on building up the internet. Explain to me again why anyone should ever take initiative, if they're not going to get to wreap the benefits of their work?

Berners-Lee's contributions (a little cheeky to simply dismiss it as HTML) turned the Internet from a collection of interconnected computers used by geeks in university and government to something that was navigable by ordinary people across cultures. If we were merely talking about connections between machines, there would be no issue here. The issues of who makes the rules are those that are currently overseen by the consortium and ICANN. The article is clearly talking about the kinds of regulations that are currently overseen by these bodies, as well as regulations that some governments might wish to impose.

I thought Al Gore invented...
Oh, never mind.

Yes, we all know that Berners-Lee and CERN invented HTML. What many do *not* know is that hypertext markup language is not the same thing as the Internet. The Internet is a physical thing characterized by computers addressed in a certain way. It was invented in the United States, first beginning life as Arpanet. The World Wide Web, the standards for which are overseen by W3C, is NOT the Internet.

I think Tim Berners-Lee and other folks at CERN might argue with the authors' contention that the internet was an American invention. Currently, the World Wide Web Consortium and ICANN, both organizations with international membership, oversee standards. Certainly we don't need the UN involved -- neither should the US government exercise a dominant role.