Although the US Department of Commerce said recently that it would continue to oversee the internet, its opponents are planning to devolve its governance into localised zones, writes Jim Colgan in New York

Does anyone run the internet? Many would argue that no-one really rules the vast array of computers, websites and e-mail servers that make up the Net. The one area that does have any oversight happens to be controlled by the US Department of Commerce.

For years, it was understood that the US would eventually cede this power to an independent entity but, in an apparent reversal of policy last month, the department issued a statement saying that it had no plans to change.

The move comes in advance of a world summit to influence the future of internet governance and, in a step that could split up parts of the internet, some countries are threatening to set up their own system if the dispute is not resolved.

Since emerging from a US military experiment in the 1970s, the very nature of the internet means that there is no one authority that can shut it down thanks to its decentralised structure.

But the anarchic approach doesn't extend to domain names since only one person or entity can lay claim to one particular domain (be it a website or an e-mail address).

The ultimate overseer of this is a private corporation called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (or Icann).

While companies and people can register their own domains (like yourname.com), part of Icann's role is to create the portion at the end, such as .com, .net, or .ie (known as top-level domains). This information is stored in a master list known as the root zone file, or simply "the root", which matches names with corresponding numbers.

From the internet's inception, the US has acted as the ultimate authority over the root, even though it gave operating power to Icann in 1998. At the time, the US said it planned to eventually relinquish all oversight, but the statement two weeks ago declared it would "maintain its historic role", i.e. not give up control, citing security reasons.

"It's a demonstration of the fact that governments find it difficult to give up power," says Milton Mueller, professor of Information Studies at Syracuse University and a member of the Internet Governance Project, an academic consortium.

"They already have this control and they're refusing to give it up, even though they promised they would give it up years ago," he adds.

Criticism has poured in from some technologists who favour internationalising the system as well as individual countries which are angry that one nation gets a special role.

However, others say the US has been a benign overseer and deserves its status since the internet was invented by Americans.

The Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries, a regional association, has said in a statement that it encouraged the US to decentralise the function and allow individual groups and governments "to exercise local supervision of their components in the root".

Some countries have expressed fears that the US could turn off their internet access.

Although debate over who should control the root is intensifying, some experts believe the criticism is overblown. While Icann administers the domain name system, it doesn't control the actual flow of internet traffic. Rather it sets up a top-level domain and assigns it to a country or organisation for them to administer.

"I'm a little perplexed as to why there's so much commotion about this," says Michael Nelson, vice-president for public policy at the Internet Society, a professional organisation for members of the internet technical community. "It's just restating the status quo."

The US statement does not mention a specific change but it seems contrary to an agreement drawn up with Icann in 1998.

That memorandum of understanding said that the organisation would assume authority of the root by September 2006.

Few take issue with the US handling of authority up to now, but Mueller says that misses the point.

"I've heard it compared to nuclear weapons. You've got this power, the results of which would be so ugly that no one will use it," he says.

"We want to use a checks and balances system that internationalises it to help the internet survive."

The debate over internationalising internet governance involves another question - how much of a role should any government have? If the US severs its ties with Icann, there would be no country with oversight, although it would continue to have international members on its board.

Some (including the US) say that the group should resist any inter-governmental meddling, while others say its functions should be taken over entirely by the United Nations.

The World Summit on the Information Society, a conference run by the UN, will address this question in Tunisia this November following a preliminary conference two months earlier.

It is the second such summit to look at the issue and a working group report released this week suggests four possible models for governance, with varying degrees of oversight.

Governments are far from coming to a consensus on how much oversight there should be but there is growing sentiment that it shouldn't belong to the US alone. Brazil recently made a sweeping multilateral proposal for handling domain allocation and issues such as cyber crime and spam.

While the US statement said that dialogue on internet governance should continue in an international forum, it emphasised support for "market-based approaches and private sector leadership".

Some experts worry that a stalemate might result in a rival organisation creating its own top-level domains, effectively splitting up the internet into different zones. Officials in Turkey recently announced its own such system and the European organisation has said it wants to find ways to circumvent Icann.

However, Nelson says there are too many reasons keeping people connected for the internet to split.

Vint Cerf, a co-inventor of the internet's original architecture and a member of Icann, supports the US market-based approach.

As governance of the internet becomes a more pressing issue, he says that he fears the potential for overstepping with control.

"It will be driven by political interests and not the best interests of users of the internet," he says.

Some see the US move as its own brand of political posturing to influence negotiations in advance of the summit. In many ways, the move is symbolic since control is mainly in the hands of the internet's users anyway.

In fact, Cerf points to this aspect of the internet - its "bottom-up" development - as its greatest success.

Those calling for more government involvement are from another era, he says.

"They say 'who's in charge?' and the answer is 'almost no one'," he says.