Peter Griffin: Internet is doing just fine, so politicians, lay off

The United Nations has failed in its bid to take control of the internet, and good job, too. The last thing we need is a bureaucratic body meddling with the infrastructure of one of the most persuasive and powerful networks in the world.
The current batch of innovative web companies, led by Google, are doing just fine giving a world audience useful web applications without intervention by the UN or any other geopolitical body.

Use of the internet is growing at a very fast rate without the UN's help. Its growth is tied to economic, social and technological development.

The barriers of entry to the internet are getting lower and in developing countries, where wireless technologies are being used to build the communications networks they lack, access will play a huge role in bridging the digital divide.

The small United States-based body Icann has until now run the internet, assigning domain names and co-ordinating technological improvements to the network that fires information round the world between millions of computers.

Icann's remit is about to expire. This has led to much hand-wringing among people who think control of the internet should be more widely distributed.

But why meddle with something and add layers of bureaucracy when it is already working fine? That's what most of those attending the World Summit on the Internet Society in Tunisia this week were asking.

At the UN-sponsored summit, officials argued for the formation of an international body within the UN to govern the internet in the interests of lessening the digital divide between those countries with good internet representation - the US, Europe and Japan - and those without, mostly in the Third World.

Tunisia was an ironic location for the summit - many consider the country one of the worst offenders when it comes to internet censorship. It has low broadband and telephone penetration. Reporters covering the conference were harassed and, in at least one case, beaten up.

The world may be united on many issues, but when it comes to the internet there are huge philosophical differences on how it should be run and what level of control governments should have over the information their citizens access.

The problem is that the countries calling for the internationalisation of the internet are often those guilty of filtering web content to suit their political agendas.

The big villains here are China, Myanmar [Burma] and Iran. The real battle should be to ensure that the world's citizens have access to the same information, in the same format, wherever they live and whoever they are governed by.

A global summit to discuss the manipulation and censoring of internet-based information would be much more beneficial to the people supposedly served by the UN - the citizens of the world. That was off the agenda in Tunisia - too touchy a subject for public airing, it seems.

Why is the issue of who controls the development of the internet coming to a head now? It's because the promises that were made five or 10 years ago about how the internet would change the way we work and live are starting to look realistic. The success of Google, which offers from central servers via the web everything from email and mapping services to instant messaging and internet telephony, has inspired a technology industry that has so far not really managed to pull off the web services model.

Web services were all the rage at the start of the millennium when the so-called allocation service provider (ASP) model gained ground. We were told that every facet of business and many of our personal transactions and dealings with Government would take place online. This has been slower to happen than expected, but the worm is turning.

Google's recent tie-up with Sun Microsystems, which is a specialist in network architecture, only strengthens its play in web services.

And now we have the arrival of Microsoft Live, the company's co-ordinated punt at entering the web services market on a huge scale. Next year will see the debut of Office Live, a service that adds real-time, online elements to Microsoft's uber-successful Office productivity software suite.

But this time Microsoft is well and truly on the back foot, with Google, Yahoo and even eBay and its new Skype acquisition leaving the world's biggest software company to shame in its laggardly approach to web services so far.

A new battle for supremacy in web-based services is kicking off. As a result, we're likely to see the arrival of applications that profoundly change the way we use the internet. In this environment, two things will become hugely important: high broadband penetration, especially in developing countries, and an efficient next-generation infrastructure model. Web traffic is only going to increase hugely as more people connect to centralised web services through browsers.

The internet is going gangbusters right now. The international community needs a voice in how it evolves, but let's not ditch what has been a very successful formula.