Following European Union commissioner for Information Society and Media Viviane Reding's video-blog call for a "globally responsible, privatised ICANN," the European Commission (EC) called for "an open, independent and accountable governance of the internet".

In a Commission Communication entitled Internet governance: the next steps, the EC made proposals for "the governance of the internet to be more open, transparent and inclusive," an EU media statement said.

Acknowledging the private sector's role in development and day-to-day management of the internet, the EC said that the internet's "growing importance for society as a whole, however, increasingly requires governments to be more actively involved in the key decisionmaking that underlies the Internet’s development".

The commission communication went on to say "there was now a higher and understandable expectation that governments would be more proactive than they may have been in the past in defending the public interest," concluding that "continuing to pursue an exclusively ‘back-seat’ approach to the development of international Internet governance practices was therefore not an option".

With the latest in a series of agreements between Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses, and the US government coming to an end in September 2009, the EC said it was "an appropriate time therefore for the EU to review the progress of ICANN to date, and to identify what changes if any may be desirable."

Though the EC did not go as far as Redding to directly call for the creation of a "G-12 for Internet Governance," it did insist that "current arrangements for unilateral oversight in regard to ICANN and IANA need to be replaced with an alternative mechanism to ensure that ICANN has multilateral accountability."

The fact that ICANN is registered in California and answers only to local law, has been a sore point for both Redding and the EC.
According to the EC, "the question would need to be addressed of how to ensure that the legal character of ICANN’s incorporation in California does not prevent proper account being taken of governmental input.

The commission communication concluded that the "EU should seek to initiate discussions with the US government on how a more equitable arrangement might be found....which respects the national priorities of the US while at the same time reflecting the legitimate expectations and interests of the international community."