It's been a while since my last blog entry – not from a shortage of things to write about.
I have woken up this morning in Geneva, where the ITU is holding a meeting of world governments over what to do about this Internet thing.
It is called PrepCom3, it being the third preparatory committee meet-up until the big world summit in Tunis in November. And top of the list of discussion is, as ever, Internet Governance – namely, who should run the Internet from now on.
Currently it is an odd amalgam of organisations losely held in line by a US private company called ICANN. ICANN however is, in formation at least, run by the US government.
Needless to say, other governments of the world want some formalised role in running the Internet and so there have been months, years even, of discussions over how this should work.
The difficulty, as you can imagine, is that the US government doesn't want to cede control. Equally China and other countries, through their censoring of stuff on the Internet, has worried some countries. And a number of other countries just hate the US being in charge.
PrepCom3 has been going on a week and it would appear that they haven't got very far. More groups have been formed to discuss the exact wording, and bickering and back-biting has slowed the whole process to a crawl.
However, with luck, it should start picking up from today and real progress made.
I shall endeavour to track down and interview all the main people in the process. How successful I'll be, who knows, depends on how friendly people are and how heavy the security is.
If you want to follow what's going on by the way, all the relevant feeds can be found at http://www.itu.int/ibs/WSIS/p2/pc3/index.html.
Otherwise I'll be sticking stuff here and writing stories for The Register about it.
Right, have to go get my media badge and join the party…
