The “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” by John Perry Barlow in the end somehow reconnected the 9th Internet Governance Forum and the new Internet Ungovernance Forum held in Istanbul last week, reports IP Watch.

Juan Alfonso Fernández González poses 10 questions about Internet governance that needed to be answered at NETmundial – and provides their answers, reports IP Watch.

The European Parliament has decided to clearly limit network operators’ possibilities to treat selected services differently for purely economic reasons, reports IP Watch.

The .au Domain Administration (auDA) has released a report on the outcome of the ICANN 49 meeting in Singapore.

The auDA report discusses the meeting’s deliberations on five issues:

• IANA oversight transition
• Internet governance
• Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC)
• Other highlights
• Takeaways for Australian stakeholders

NTIA Administrator, Lawrence E. Strickland, has said that claims the US is “abandoning the Internet” could not be further from the truth.

In a recent posting, Strickland said his agency’s decision to relinquish responsibility for DNS stewardship “in no way diminishes our commitment to preserving the Internet as an engine for economic growth and innovation”.

Strickland also said that any transition plan must meet the conditions of supporting the multistakeholder process and protecting the security, stability and resiliency of the Internet.

Richard Hill’s analysis of the 187 contributions to NETMundial show that there is no consensus on whether governments should have equal status with other stakeholders in control of the Internet.

Other findings of the analysis include:

• there is broad support for:  improving security;  ensuring respect for privacy;  ensuring freedom of expression;  globalizing the IANA function
• there is significant support for:  increasing the participation of developing countries in discussions of Internet governance
• there is some support for:  ensuring universal access;  strengthening the Internet Governance Forum;  interventions to foster infrastructure development and deployment;  interventions to ensure network neutrality

Most of the contributions agreed that the following key principles should apply to the Internet and its governances:

• offline rights apply equally online
• the Internet should remain a single, universal, interconnected, interoperable, secure, stable, resilient, sustainable, free, and trusted network
• Internet governance should involve all stakeholders from all parts of the world and be open, transparent, accountable, and bottom up
• policies should create a stable and predictable environment that fosters investment and favors innovation

But the implementation of these general, high-level principles, is open to significant variation.

The UN Secretary General and head of the UN International Telecommunication Union (ITU) have praised the US government’s decision to relinquish its remaining control over the Internet domain name system (DNS).

In his statement, the ITU Secretary-General expressed a desire for “development of the appropriate mechanisms which will ensure fair, equitable and inclusive management of critical internet resources for the benefit of al” to be explored at the April 2014 NETMundial forum in Brazil.

The US government has stated it will transition key Internet domain name functions to the “global multistakeholder community”.

In the historic announcement, the US Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has asked the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to “convene global stakeholders to develop a proposal” to take over the NTIA’s current responsibility for coordinating the Internet’s domain name system (DNS).

NTIA’s responsibility includes the procedural role of administering changes to the authoritative root zone file – the database containing the lists of names and addresses of all top-level domains.  NTIA currently contracts with ICANN to carry out these functions and has a Cooperative Agreement with Verisign under which it performs related root zone management functions.

Transitioning NTIA out of its role marks the final phase of the privatization of the DNS as outlined by the U.S. Government in 1997.

One of the few certainties about the future transition is that responsibility for the DNS will lie with the private sector. In an associated fact sheet, the NTIA states that it “will not accept a proposal that replaces the NTIA role with a government or an intergovernmental organization solution”.