(Photo - NASA)

More than 200 leaders from government and the private sector are meeting in New York to discuss regulating the Internet. This Global Forum on Internet Governance is sponsored by the United Nations.

The forum is aimed at putting together a set of Internet governance guidelines for United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He is expected to present this report to the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia next year.

One of the first issues forum participants have identified is what it really means to govern the information superhighway. Robert Kahn, who is one of the pioneers of the Internet and is currently president and chief executive officer of the private Corporation for National Research Initiatives, says it is hard to define what Internet governance is.

"It's really hard to converge on what this notion of Internet governance really means," he said. "We certainly are less near a definition of what that means now than we were when we started. That doesn't mean there is not a role for governments to play, that there are not things that need to be managed and effectively coordinated, it's just that I think coming to grips to that is going to be an interesting challenge."

Another participant, Anriette Esterhuysen, executive director of the private Association for Progressive Communications in South Africa explained that when formulating policies over regulating cyberspace, policy-makers should realize that they are not dealing with just technology issues but also social issues.

"Information and communication technology policies are more than technical policies," she said. "They are social policies and you have to approach it not just from a technical perspective but from a social and developmental perspective."

According to Ms. Esterhuysen, this means also addressing issues of access. She says there is an enormous gap between developed and developing countries when it comes to access to the Internet as well as decision-making regarding the online world. There are an estimated 700 million to one billion Internet users globally, the overwhelming majority in Europe, North America and Asia.

The discussions over how to govern the information superhighway also center on ensuring that regulations don't stifle the creativity and innovation that the Internet creates. Another Internet pioneer, Vinton Cerf, vice president of global telecommunications company MCI, warns policymakers need to be aware of the risks.

"If we focus on managing the Internet so carefully and so restrictively that it no longer is a place where innovation is supported, then we run the risk that by attempting to govern we actually kill the value in the system," he said.

With the enormous growth of the Internet in the past decade, there are increasing calls for some form of global coordination in overseeing cyberspace, though not everyone agrees it should be governments doing the regulating. However, most agree that government action is needed in certain areas, such as combating e-mail viruses and attacks on the Internet's infrastructure.

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