The United Nations is hosting a gathering of up to 300 delegates at its headquarters in New York today. The plan to is for the participants to collectively gather their thoughts on the thorny topic, and prepare advice for secretary general Kofi Annan.

Sarbuland Khan, executive director of the UN’s three-year-old ICT Task Force, told ComputerWire the meeting will be attended by all the key leaders in the internet community as well as public sector and non-governmental organizations.

The group will explore areas such as legal jurisdiction, intellectual property, internet infrastructure, security, competition, and other issues. The meeting follows recent talks at the EU, ITU, ICANN and the International Chamber of Commerce.

The idea is for the participants to work out what are the areas where we have common views, what are the areas where we have divergent views, and how to move forward on the divergent views, Khan said.

In December, the UN and its International Telecommunications Union hosted the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva. Almost 200 government delegates signed up to a Declaration of Principles and a Plan of Action.

The Plan calls for Annan to form a working group that will define what internet governance is, who the stakeholders are and what responsibilities they have, and what the way forward is. The group will report to the WSIS phase II in Tunis next year.

People will go away from the meeting knowing they had the ability to participate, Khan said of today’s gathering. In the Geneva meeting there was a feeling that there was too much focus on governments.

Khan said that the WSIS process is not, as some have suggested, about the UN wrest control of the internet’s naming and addressing systems from ICANN, which was suggested by early drafts of the Plan of Action.

It is a misperception. The UN is not an interested party in this, we’re providing a neutral platform for all the stakeholders, he said. The UN is not interested in taking over any of these functions… one of the issues is to clarify that.

The meeting runs until Friday. This morning, it will be kicked off with a nuts and bolts talk by Vint Cerf, who co-invented the TCP/IP protocol with Robert Kahn and currently chairs ICANN’s board of directors.

This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire