Legal regulation of the Internet
By Vladimir Golubev
Date: November 21, 2003
Legal regulation of the Internet and any social relations related to the use of it is an intractable problem. But whether it is possible to do without any regulation in general?
United Nations intend to raise a question about establishment of special supervising body under aegis of the United Nations which would be engaged in administration of the Internet. This question is supposed to be raised at UN World Summit which will be held in Geneva December 10-12, 2003. Besides it is planned to discuss problems of fighting cybercrime, computer viruses and spam.
The idea of the Monitoring Internet has been supported by Russia, China, Brazil, India and Saudi Arabia. As it is known, nowadays administrative functions in the Internet are carried out by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which is based in California, U.S. The ICANN assignes IP blocks and the first level domain names. The countries -initiators of the project would like to delegate administrative functions to organization which is under control of United Nations, for example, International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
It is expected that the fighting hi-tech crimes will be more more effective under the help of such supervising body. And the governments of the interested countries could solve cyber incidents through the mechanisms of the United Nations.
However this initiative is not supported by the USA, the countries of European Community, Japan and other industrialized countries. They believe that intervention of the governmental bodies in regulation of the Internet can impair a freedom of speech and public self-expression and to development of an information society. They think the Internet should remain in hands of private sector forming the Worldnet.
Computer Crime Research Center
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