The report of the UN Working Group on Internet Governance, a copy of which has been obtained by ComputerWire, suggests the creation of a new organization that would take over the internet oversight functions of the US Department of Commerce.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan will officially announce the report’s findings on July 18, less than two weeks after Michael Gallagher, an assistant secretary at Commerce, said the US has no intention of relinquishing its internet governance powers.

No single government should have a pre-eminent role in relation to international internet governance, the report, which was compiled last month following several months of meetings of the WGIG, but has yet to be published, reads.

The WGIG recommends the creation of a new space for dialogue for all stakeholders on an equal footing on all Internet governance related issues, the report reads, stating that this forum should preferably be linked to the United Nations.

The report then outlines four possible forms that this forum could take. Three of the four proposals envisage a UN-anchored organization that would take over some of the powers of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

The powers in question relate to the management of internet domain names and IP addresses, a function currently carried out by the Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers with the oversight of the NTIA, part of the Department of Commerce.

Three of the four proposed Models in the WGIG report would keep ICANN intact, but with oversight from the new UN body. The fourth would create a World ICANN, WICANN, a reformed internationalized ICANN linked to the United Nations.

In the report, Model 1 imagines a Global Internet Council, made up of governmental representatives and anchored in the United Nations that would take over the functions relating to international Internet governance performed by the Department of Commerce.

This GIC would set international policy over domain names and IP addresses, such as deciding which new top-level domains to introduce, and how IPv6 addresses should be allocated, and which organizations run country-code domains.

It would also have policy-setting and coordination functions on matters such as spam, security, privacy and crime, and would facilitate inter-governmental treaties on matters relating to internet governance. It would be led by governments, with the private sector having a purely advisory capacity.

Model 2 endorses more or less the status quo, saying there is no need for a specific oversight organization. The new forum in Model 2 would essentially be a talking shop with the power to make analyses and recommendations.

Model 3 talks of an International Internet Council, not explicitly linked to the UN, which would also take over Commerce’s oversight powers, but would have narrower powers on other matters than the GIC outlined in Model 1.

Model 4 is the broadest. It talks of three bodies, which combined would help coordinate inter-governmental cooperation, oversee private sector functions such as address resource management, and provide a forum for public-private policy discussions.

The Global Internet Policy Council in Model 4 would be government-led, with the private sector in observer mode and would be responsible for international public policy relating to the internet and internet standards.

The Global Internet Governance Forum would be more of a forum for debate and coordination, and would draw on governments, civil society and private sector organizations in an equal capacity.

Model 4 would also explicitly link ICANN to the UN, creating a WICANN that would be private sector but answerable to an Oversight Committee, replacing the US NTIA, that would be selected by the Global Internet Policy Council.

WICANN would have a host country agreement, suggesting that it would not necessarily have to be based in the US, where ICANN is currently incorporated as a California non-profit.

The report will be unveiled by Annan on Monday, and later this year it will be the centerpiece of discussions at the World Summit on the Information Society, a UN-organized forum to be held in Tunis, Tunisia.

It seems that the NTIA was tipped off to the WGIG report’s content. Last week, NTIA assistant secretary Gallagher announced a reversal of US government policy that would have seen ICANN’s ties to the US government severed in September 2006.

Gallagher outlined four US Principles on the Internet’s Domain Name and Addressing System, one of which was that it will maintain its historic role in authorizing changes or modifications to the authoritative root zone file.

Currently, ICANN, ostensibly a transparent, bottom-up decision-making body, is important because it has authority over two important databases.

First, the domain name system root zone file, which tells computers where to find domains such as .com, .uk and .biz. The second, the so-called IANA function, is ultimately responsible for allocating blocks of IP address space to ISPs.

The new US policy was made, purportedly, in the name of security. NTIA said it wanted to take no action that would have the potential to adversely impact the effective and efficient operation of the DNS.

But few observers doubted that the move was a shot across the UN’s bow, coming so soon before the publication of the WGIG report.

Some in the US are wary of the UN’s weighty bureaucracy, and there is the perception that it gives too much power to undemocratic nations. The WGIG itself was light on representatives hailing from the US.

The 12 governmental officials on the 40-person WGIG come from Barbados, Belgium, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Japan, Luxembourg, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa. The rest are drawn from the private sector, academia and civil society.

Other observers see continued US oversight of the internet as a threat to its long-term stability.

While the US is the only nation that can wield unilateral power over the internet’s few centralized resources, the theory goes, the chances increase that other nations will decide to splinter, compromising the internet’s end-to-end interoperability.

The WGIG is more diplomatic, and is being guided by UN concerns such as internet access in developing nations and multilingualism. Currently, the resources ICANN manages are not available in many non-English character sets.

This medium has changed, WGIG chair Nitin Desai said at an ICANN meeting in Luxembourg yesterday. You have a billion internet users out there. It is an increasingly central part of business, of media, of governmental operations.

Remember also that the greater part of the growth of internet, looking ahead, now, is going to take place in developing countries, he said, according to a transcript of the meeting, in countries where English is not the first language, or even the second language.