Tunisia, known for its Mediterranean beaches at Djerba and Monastir, its spectacular archaeological sites and camel safaris, likes to tout itself as the "Gateway to the Orient." But this week, the country has become the gateway to cyberspace. Posters and banners hang in the airport welcoming all those who have come to the nation's capital city Tunis for the WSIS 2005 -- or World Summit on the Information Society. After many years of preparations, the summit opens in Tunis on Wednesday, and the item at the top of its agenda will be to address some of the fundamental questions facing the global information society.

The organizers of the intergovernmental conference, sponsored by the United Nations, are hosting some 10,000 attendees from over 120 countries in the "Parc des Expositions du Kram" in Tunis. Fifty heads of state are there, as are high ranking industry luminaries and many representatives from a variety of associations and NGOs. The highest-ranking attendee -- and conference's referee -- will be the summit's sponsor, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

His and other moderating voices will likely be urgently needed. Indeed, tensions were already high before this meeting of the global information elite, who have spent the last three years addressing issues as varied as cyber-crime, the spam problem, intellectual property questions and unrestricted access to the Internet. Despite all diplomatic efforts, the various key players' positions on one of the central questions the world will face in the 21st century were further apart on the eve of the summit than ever before.

US cyberspace hegemony

The essence of the conflict is as simple as it is explosive. It centers on the issue of "Internet governance" -- in other words, on who will control the key resources of this fascinating global network in the future, a network that an estimated 1 billion users now use to send e-mails, search for information, shop, play, chat or communicate with one another.
 
It's an open-and-shut case for the United States. True to form, the US's preferred candidate is the only power it truly trusts: itself. In fact, the Americans already took the preemptive step in October of announcing that their position in this regard is "non-negotiable." But a large and rather heterogeneous alliance finds this completely unacceptable. It includes such diverse members as China, Iran, Brazil and South Africa and, more recently, the European Union. It was only two years ago that the Europeans were declaring their full support for their American friends. But now Brussels is demanding a stronger voice for the international community and an end to American hegemony over cyberspace.

"The 25 EU nations unanimously call for a new model of cooperation for the Internet, one in which all interested countries sit at the same table," says EU Commissioner Viviane Reding, who is attending the Tunis summit as the European Commission's chief negotiator.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the official US position has been one of obstinacy. The Bush administration let it be known that the Americans have no intention of relinquishing their historically preeminent role. And on Wednesday, it appeared that it wouldn't have to. In an 11th hour agreement just before the beginning of the conference, negotiators agreed to leave the US in charge of the Internet's addressing system, but would give an new international group more say in how the Internet works.

Internet less anarchic than many think

But even as the US made it a priority to keep control in the private sector and in the US, even some voices in the US -- including the influential magazine Foreign Affairs -- were critical of the American position. Power? Control? Governance? Aren't we talking about the Internet, that anarchistic, difficult-to-regulate virtual landscape?

As widespread and romantic as this notion is, it is far from reality. In the early years, when it was mostly academics who were developing the offshoots of what was then known as the Arpanet, a network originally used primarily for military purposes, things were likely more relaxed and informal. Indeed, for decades control over the Internet's central technical standards was essentially in the hands of only one man -- the bearded computer guru Jon Postel, who died in 1998.

But today there are more than 2 billion Internet addresses, and the net has long since become not only a critical factor in the global economy, but also plays an important role in education, culture and science. Nowadays business transactions that in some way involve the Internet already make up just under 9 percent of global trade.

The commercialism and rapid expansion of the Internet has also increased political interest in the World Wide Web. In 1998, the Clinton administration created a nonprofit organization called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN for short, which is headquartered in the California town of Marina del Rey and, through key agreements, is closely tied to the US Department of Commerce.

This central Internet administration has now become a flashpoint for international criticism. Only it has the authority to introduce new top level domains like ".eu" and to make the necessary changes in the 13 so-called root servers -- the supercomputers that perform such tasks as converting recognizable Internet addresses like www.spiegelinternational.com into unwieldy numerical sequences like 195.71.11.67.

Those countries opposed to US control now argue that, in theory, the US Department of Commerce could simply disable a domain and plunge members of the "Axis of Evil," for example, into communicative chaos. Back in the early days of ICANN, the Americans attempted to defuse their obvious legitimacy problem by establishing an advisory body for foreign governments, the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC). It now includes more than a hundred member states but, as the name implies, their role is merely advisory. They have no say on the organization's powerful board of directors.

A .xxx domain vetoed

According to network expert Wolfgang Kleinwächter of the University of Aarhus in Denmark, the US certainly makes use of its dominant position when it comes to key decisions. It recently prevented the creation of a ".xxx" domain, because deeply conservative US organizations were vehemently opposed to a domain devoted to sex. Indeed, many of the important decisions made at ICANN favor the United States and its powerful Internet economy. One example of such favoritism is the American company Verisign, which controls the most common domain, ".com." Verisign's control over the domain ".net" recently expired and was put up for competitive bid. But despite a strong field of applicants, the contract was again awarded to a US company.

At the first phase of the summit, in Geneva in 2003, the governance issue became so contentious that the UN established a special body to deal with the problem, the Working Group on Internet Governance. It managed to agree on a definition and draft four possible models for the future. But it was unable to prevent the conflict from escalating even further leading up to the Tunis conference.

Naturally, the participating countries take widely varying approaches to Internet governance. China and Iran, both ruled by regimes that rigorously filter and censor their networks, favor models with essentially sovereign rights of governance -- a horrific scenario for the Internet community. Others prefer a UN-administered body, one for which a precedent already exists. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) administers and regulates international dialing prefixes, such as Germany's 0049 or 001 for the States. Indeed, the head of the ITU has announced on several occasions that his organization, in addition to being well-qualified, would be pleased to take over the job. But the US was quick to shoot down the ITU's offer. "We will not allow the United Nations to take over management of the Internet," fumed the US Commerce Department's chief negotiator, David Gross.

These opposing stances show -- despite the last minute agreement on Wednesday -- just how hardened the fronts have become. Some have even threatened to develop their own isolated networks, which would put an end to the notion of a World Wide Web. But still, the compromise agreement does not come as a complete surprise. "We do not control and rule the Internet, we merely coordinate it," said ICANN director Theresa Swinehart last week, although she quickly added that "there is hardly any system that couldn't use some improvement." Last Thursday, ICANN announced its intention to "cooperate more effectively" with the governments on its advisory committee. And then it was revealed that the US Commerce Department apparently plans to put key ICANN functions up for competitive bid when the organization's current contracts expire in 2006. But, as the recent ".net" example shows, this doesn't necessarily mean very much.

Why Tunisia?

Officials at non-governmental organizations are especially frustrated. The original theme of the UN conference in Tunis -- bridging the digital divide between poor and rich countries by launching a "digital solidarity fund" -- had been completely relegated to the sidelines in the run-up to this week's event. Many hope that with the issue of control having been resolved for now, attention can now shift back to the originally scheduled theme of increasing access across the globe.

But even without the difficult issue of Internet control, the meeting -- or more specifically, the location of the meeting -- had raised a number of eyebrows. According to human rights organization Amnesty International, "freedom of the press is virtually non-existent" in Tunisia. The regime of President Ben Ali, says Amnesty International, has a history of blocking access to Web sites it considers undesirable.