U.S. Maintains Control of Net

Kevin Poulsen

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TUNIS, Tunisia -- Negotiators working late into the night Tuesday shook hands on a deal that creates a new U.N.-sponsored global forum to explore problems like spam and cybercrime, while leaving the United States firmly in control of the internet's domain name system.

The last minute accord settled an issue that threatened to derail the U.N.'s World Summit on the Information Society, which began here Wednesday. The multilateral gathering -- conceived to bridge the "digital divide" between rich nations and poor -- has drawn thousands of delegates and observers from around the globe to this port city in the North African desert.

A U.N. working group, followed by governments including China, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and the 25-member European Union, had all proposed taking away control of the domain name "root zone file" from the United States and handing it off to a multinational agency. The root file is the master list of allowed top-level domains -- currently numbering nearly 300, including generic domains like .com and .info, and hundreds of two-letter county codes like .uk and .au.