Whatever happened to Enhanced cooperation?

Last week, I took part in a panel discussion on Enhanced Cooperation at the UN Commission for Science and Technology for Development with Theresa Swinehart of Verizon and Parminder Singh of ICT for Change.

I was a bit surprised to be invited, to be honest, because "Enhanced cooperation" has been a bit quiet recently. It made me reminisce: back in the day, Enhanced Cooperation was Internet governance viagra.

The story goes like this. Imagine you're a government rep in 2003. You hear that this thing called the Internet is going to be really big. When you ask who's in charge, you are given the worrying answer:

"No one. It's a distributed network, that's the point."

So, like any good regulator, you look for choke points and quickly find the domain name system. You are troubled to learn that it's controlled by a California corporation, and the US is the only government in sight.

The US government, and its role in overseeing ICANN became a hot button during the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).