One of the men who helped develop the earliest Internet architecture thinks the United Nations is going off course when it comes to whether government officials should set Net policy.
Vinton Cerf said outside a conference of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers that governments would be better off banding to fight world electronic crime and develop best practices encouraging e-commerce growth. The U.N. put together a task force to determine governments’ role in Net policy last December.
“We don’t need redundant coordinating bodies,” Cerf told reporters, “but what we do need and don’t have are parts of the U.N. to look at issues such as electronic commerce, the question of digital signatures, tax, fraud, and enforcement.”
He also said education was the best way to attack Internet abuse. “We can try technical methods to stop abuses like spam, but there is a limit to technical means,” he said. “We can use enforcement to try to detect and punish [offenders]. But if we can't detect them all, then all we can do is try to teach people what is morally right, what isn't.”
Some Internet analysts in the recent past have questioned whether the U.N.’s involvement in trying to steer Internet policy is advisable because so many U.N. member nations – including China, which has made recent cyberspace headlines for doing so – seem more determined to crack down on and stifle Internet content and expression.
