Researchers and students from EuroNF are kindly invited to the following PhD course. Feel free to distribute this call throughout your research groups/institution.

Internet Governance

Prof. Wolfgang Kleinwaechter
Unversity of Aarhus, Denmark
Department for Media and Information Studies
November 26 – 28, 2010

The Governance of Critical Internet Ressources (CIR) - Root Servers, Domain Names, IP Addresses and Internet Protocols - is one of the most controversial issues in Internet policy. Grown bottom up in the shadow of governmental regulation in the 1970s and 1980s, the management of CIRs was developed as a multilayer multiplayer mechanism with no central authority, driven by private sector and user needs. With the growth of the Internet there was a need to move towards a more institutionalized system to guarantee the stability and security of the Internet. In 1998 a private corporation - ICANN - was established with the mandate to coordinate CIR policy. ICANN operated under a contract with the US government which terminated September, 30, 2009. A new “Affirmation of Commitments” (AoC), signed October 1, 2009 paved the way for a further internationalization of ICANN. During the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), China and other governments wanted to bring ICANN under the umbrella of an intergovernmental system. However, based on recommendations by the UN Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) from 2005 a more decentralized multilayer multiplayer mechanism was proposed and the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF) was established in 2006. In the IGF all stakeholders – governments, private sector and civil society – are involved on an equal footing. The IGF has no decision making capacity and its mandate ends in 2010. The PhD Course goes through the history of Internet Governnance, discusses the details of ICANN and IGF developments and its various political, legal, technical and socio-economic dimension including issues like new gTLDs, iDNs, transition to IPv6, DNSSEC, freedom of expression, privacy, cybersecurity, intellectual property and emerging issues which come with the "Internet of Things" (IOT) and global management mechanisms for an "Object Naming System" (ONS).