Brazil president Dilma Rousseff was a target of US surveillance
São Paulo is to host a two-day international meeting, starting on Wednesday, called by Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, one of the international leaders who was a target of US surveillance.
International unrest over US and British internet surveillance has weakened Washington's ability to shape the debate about the internet's future, according to people involved in the process.
"The US has lost the moral authority to talk about a free and open internet," said a former senior US government official.
The São Paulo meeting had the potential to become deeply political and expose rifts between countries over future control of the internet, said Greg Shatan, a partner at law firm Reed Smith in Washington. "It was called under extraordinary circumstances, it's a reaction to a perceived crisis," he said.
The US made a highly symbolic gesture last month in an attempt to defuse the situation.
In a move that had long been urged by Brussels, Washington said it planned to give up its last remaining direct role in controlling the internet. This involves checking the accuracy of changes to internet addressing made by ICANN, the international body that oversees the system. Though a limited and highly technical function, this has long been a focus for international discontent at US influence over the internet.
Even with the proposal to end its direct involvement, Washington still regards itself as an important guarantor of the internet naming system, which is key to maintaining a single, unified internet.
"It's not as though we're closing up shop and saying we're done here," Lawrence Strickling, an assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce, said this month.
Yet the offer to end the formal US link has stirred up wider questions about control of the internet, as Mr Strickling himself admitted.
Fadi Chehadé, president of ICANN, said after symbolic US control had been removed, it had to "be replaced with clear strengths and clear safeguards" to ensure the continued openness of the system.
This has thrust the unusual international arrangements for governing the internet into the spotlight while they are still being debated.
"We're really setting up a non-statebound system of international governance, there isn't anything like it," said Milton Mueller, a professor at Syracuse University. At stake were the "long-term evolution of institutions and the establishment of certain norms" that would shape the medium's future, he added - a delicate process that could be knocked off course by the tensions stirred up by the Snowden leaks.
Political pressures are becoming evident. Republicans in Washington have raised the stakes by denouncing the White House's proposal to step back from its formal role in ICANN, arguing that this risked handing control of the internet to repressive governments.
Administration officials said this overstated the significance of what was a purely technical proposal. The officials also said they would only give up the address-checking function if an alternative were found that was completely free of government influence.
"Governments can no more take over ICANN than Google can take over ICANN," Mr Strickling said.
Yet keeping undue government influence out of the internet as US authority recedes will be hard to maintain.
The US, along with countries in Europe, has backed a system that balances the influence of a number of interest groups: governments, companies, bodies representing civil society and the engineers who maintain the standards and protocols on which the internet relies.
The São Paulo meeting will serve to show whether progress towards this so-called "multi-stakeholder" approach is at risk from the fallout from the Snowden leaks.
There are signs that governments might see themselves as "more equal than others", Mr Shatan said. Government representatives would have half the key seats at the meeting and carefully worded communiqués before the event pointed to a debate about how far their role should extend, he added.
The São Paulo meeting is likely to set the tone for international discussions on internet governance, culminating at a meeting in October of the International Telecommunications Union, an arm of the UN. The ITU took a stab at exerting more control over the internet at a divisive meeting in Dubai in 2012, prompting a US walkout.
With its moral authority waning because of the surveillance scandal, Washington's hopes of holding together what it sees as a coalition of right-thinking nations dedicated to the openness of the internet could soon be in for a more severe test.
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