Cerf sees government control of Internet failing

By Pedro Fonseca

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Attempts by governments to create a controlling agency for the Internet are likely to fail, Dr. Vint Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the World Wide Web, said on Wednesday.

In an interview with Reuters on the sidelines of a United Nations-led forum on Internet governance in Rio de Janeiro, Cerf, 64, said the fact that the Web is almost entirely privately owned is a major obstacle to such control.

The forum discussed issues like the fight against child pornography and Internet security as well as the possible establishment of an intergovernmental body to coordinate such efforts.

"It's tempting to think that you need a United Nations-like structure to deal with it," Cerf said.

"I believe it will be very hard to accomplish that objective for one simple reason -- 99 percent of the Internet, the physical Internet, is in private sector hands, operated by the private sector," he said, defending a different governance structure made up of multiple stakeholders.

Multiple stakeholders is a term used by nongovernmental organizations to describe all people and entities on which a company or its products and services have an impact, including customers, governments and the society.

"Internet is used by a billion users around the world, it's not strictly a purely governmental thing to control, and that's why you need this multi-stakeholders structure to make sure all the prospects are respected," Cerf said.

He advocated the U.S.-based board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which manages the Internet's domain-name address system and which Cerf chairs, as "the first big expert in a global multi-stakeholders structure."