Law & Disorder

Tim Berners-Lee waved his iPhone playfully at the podium, then gave a boyish grin, touched its face, and instantly and wirelessly sent a message to the world, announcing the launch of the World Wide Web Foundation.

If that doesn’t seem amazing, you have to think about the context. Just 40 or so years ago, in 1969, the Internet was getting off the ground as a simple connection between two computers. By the end of 1997, almost 30 years later and eight years after Berners-Lee invented the Web, 1.7 percent of the global population—70 million people—had used the Internet. In 2009, the International Telecommunication Union estimated that Internet users jumped to 1.9 billion people, 26 percent of the global population.

Now, Berners-Lee has a new project. The World Wide Web Foundation advertises itself as an incubator "leading transformative programs to advance the Web as a medium that empowers people to bring positive change."

The place Berners-Lee chose to officially launch the new foundation was the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). This UN-facilitated event brings people of the world together to conduct informational dialogues about Internet policy. The smiling Berners-Lee was standing in a palms-surrounded conference center in Sharm El Sheikh, in the Sinai Desert.

Sir Tim had the perfect audience for his announcement of a foundation born to investigate and enhance social opportunities brought by connectivity. Among the more than 1,200 people gathered in the magnificent conference center in Sharm were Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo; Robert Kahn, a co-inventor of the Internet protocol; Hamadoun Touré, secretary general of the International Telecommunication Union; Lynn St. Amour, president and CEO of the Internet Society; and Rod Beckstrom, president and CEO of the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers.

Who knows where things might have gone if use of the Web was limited to those who could afford pay per play, or if it was limited only to those who wrote applications approved through a proprietary system? One of the key reasons the Web's evolution has been so positive for the world is the fact that Berners-Lee chose not to charge a royalty.

Berners-Lee said the Web Foundation was the next logical step in a progression that he has led to nurture his invention. First, he started the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, to assure that the Web would scale upward appropriately and be adjusted to the needs of global users in regard to standards and interoperability. Next, he began to take a look at the science of the Web as a network—the Web Science Trust. The just-announced third initiative is a start-up of sorts that is being largely underwritten by the Knight Foundation.

Berners-Lee said the planning for the new foundation has been in the works for quite some time, and it has involved input from many people who are also involved in work with the Internet Governance Forum.

"When we look at the Web, we don't look at it anymore as connected computers or as connected Web pages," he explained. "We look at the Web now as humanity connected. Humanity connected by technology. We want it to empower people. We want it to do the very best for humanity."

Internet Governance Forum

This is a turning point for Berners-Lee, and for the Internet Governance Forum. At this annual gathering, people from industry, government, and the research and civil society sectors discuss the policies and the politics of control and access in an informal setting where no rules are made, no pronouncements passed along.

“A common set of values and principles has always characterized the development and operation of the Internet,” said Lynn St. Amour, president and CEO of the Internet Society. “Open standards, freely accessible, inclusive processes and transparent governance have always been part of its evolution. Internet governance by definition must be open and inclusive. We’re obliged to assure these fundamental principles endure."

The IGF was born out of global deliberations at two meetings of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), hosted by the ITU earlier this decade. This year’s IGF is the fourth of a series of five that were suggested in the initial agreements signed by the participants in WSIS. The meeting is a watershed moment as the people at IGF this year are tasked to show if there’s a reason to continue the forums beyond the fifth year.

As Sha Zukang, under-secretary-general of the United Nations' Department of Economic and Social Affairs, noted at the IGF opening ceremony, there are 4.6 billion cell phone accounts right now and just 600 million have broadband. All critical infrastructure and most social infrastructure has now been moved online.

The battle for control over communications networks has never been as fierce as it will be over the coming decade. So it was especially interesting on the first day of the Internet Governance Forum to see ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré and Zukang, formerly China’s director-general for the department of arms control in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, both up at the podium saying nice things in a limited manner about the purpose and effectiveness of IGF.

Touré told the audience in his keynote that “IGF is a place where we can make progress on certain topics and introduce those mature topics into other more formal processes, arrangements and organizations for further consideration.”

Zukang said, “If you believe the forum is valuable, I would encourage you to say so, and tell us in what ways…If you believe that IGF has fulfilled its purpose, I would encourage you to speak out against our extension of the mandate and tell us why.”

The leadership of the ITU and Touré himself have made it clear that they prefer all non-ICANN and non-WIPO policy work to fall in their court. The government of China is one of the few IGF actors that has made it clear it does not see IGF as effective in the ways it would like it to be effective—for instance, being a body that supports the rights of governments to exercise the selective blocking and filtering of Internet content.

The final report on the efficacy and potential for the IGF’s continuance will be handed over to Zukang, who will pass it to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for a decision.

IGF coverage this week is provided courtesy of a team from Elon University in North Carolina, USA. Janna Quitney Anderson, director of the Imagining the Internet Center and associate professor in the School of Communications at Elon, wrote this entry. See more on IGF Egypt at www.imaginingtheinternet.org.