Newsmaker: U.N. says its plans are misunderstood

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One part of the agreement says that the forum should be "lightweight and decentralized" and subject to periodic review.
Shaw: There's a bit of constructive ambiguity here that lets flexibility in the future...In this text, at least, a forum is not necessarily seen as a permanent institution.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan says he wants to review this forum's work in five years. Does that mean that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers could be folded into the forum at that time? Or the converse?
Shaw: I can see several scenarios. One of the best results is that technology solves some of the problems. We have a distributed root for the telephone system. Maybe we can have a distributed root in the DNS (Domain Name System) that would let these possibilities go away.

The second thing is that we have to realize we're in a time of transition in terms of how government policy-makers and regulators think of the Internet. If we think of the time when ICANN was established, that was the apex of the thinking that "there shall never be any regulation of the Internet." Fast-forward seven years and the landscape has changed incredibly. We see governments around the world, including the FCC, applying the same kind of regulations they applied in the telephony world.

I'm not sure that answers my question about ICANN and the forum.
Shaw: I think back to a piece Eli Noam wrote in the New York Times circa 1997. It was called "An Unfettered Internet, Keep Dreaming." It was a critique of e-commerce policy and said each government is going to apply its own value system to the Internet. The Internet has become so pervasive it's difficult to treat it differently.

You can try to ban spam at a national level. But you need international cooperation to deal with it. You have tension between national interests and international cooperation.

One hot topic is who can add new top-level domain names. How much of that should be a technical compared to a policy decision?
Shaw: Until one resolves this question about whether this is a technical issue or a regulatory issue it's very hard for ICANN to succeed in its mission. Now the governments are saying here (in this agreement) that there are a number of cross-cutting public policy issues that require attention.

What does this agreement mean for the future of spam regulation?
Shaw: We just had a paper presented a couple of days ago that was done in conjunction with Harvard, a model law for spam based on an industry code of conduct backed by regulators. I don't see right now any overarching treaty on spam coming but there's a lot of efforts. ITU, OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), and APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) are meeting to see how we can avoid duplication of effort.

Some delegates have been complaining that there's too much free speech online. What expertise do autocrats from nations like Cuba and Zimbabwe have to lend in discussions of the Internet's future?
Shaw: I firmly believe having worked in international organizations for over 20 years that we can often learn something from many different countries. Some countries like Korea are very successful in broadband. In Brazil, 95 percent of people file taxes online. So I avoid focusing on the negative aspects.

The Internet seems to have been running pretty well without an official international U.N. forum. Why do we need one?
Shaw: It's clear that a lot of people feel left out of the policy dialogue. They don't feel like they have a lot of influence or say in how decisions are made. And in the case of developing countries it's important to hear their voice, to hear what they say. You can't just say, "We know what's best for you." They're the people who are going to have to go back home and adapt their national policies accordingly.

That's one aspect. The other is that clearly a lot of governments feel that there are deficiencies in the current system and they don't feel like what they consider to be a legitimate public policy interest is reflected. And they feel there should be change.

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