Today Computer Wire had this Breaking News:

“The World Summit on the Information Society will hold its first workshop on internet governance in late February, it has emerged. The invitation-only group will try to come up with definitions and recommendations on how the internet should be governed.

The WSIS, backed by the UN and its International Telecommunications Union, said this week that it will hold the workshop February 26 and 27 at the ITU headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

The meeting will discuss the WSIS Declaration of Principle and, primarily, the Plan of Action that called for an independent group of experts to figure out if and how international governments should formally get involved in internet policymaking.

Under earlier drafts of the Plan, internet governance was roughly defined to include the powers of ICANN, the Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers, and IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

ICANN, which also runs IANA, has responsibility for assigned IP addresses and top-level internet domains to countries and private organizations around the world. The California-based organization comes in for frequent criticism for being too US-centric.

Almost 200 global government delegates met in Geneva in December to approve the two WSIS documents. They will meet again in Tunisia next year to further develop the agreements. The internet governance group is tasked with reporting before that meeting.”

The ITU also had the following related note posted yesterday on it’s Newslog:

“The ITU will host a Workshop on Internet Governance on February 26-27 2004. The workshop objective is to initiate a process to prepare ITU’s inputs and position vis-?-vis the working group to be established on Internet governance resulting from the Action Plan adopted on 12 December 2003 at the first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society.

The workshop will provide a forum for exchanging views on definitions, viewpoints, visions and analytical studies on Internet governance. The output of the workshop will be submitted to the appropriate ITU decision-making bodies for their further consideration. Attendance is by invitation only to ITU Member States, Sector Members and selected experts in Internet governance issues. The workshop will be audiocast live and archived.”

Bret Fausett provides this link to the ITU’s invitation letter page.