【单选题】

The Internet In November 2005, thousands of government representatives and information experts met in Tunis, Tunisia to discuss the future of the Internet. The United Nations organized the World Summit on the Information Society to discuss Internet growth in developing nations.But the three-day meetings also developed into a struggle over who controls the Internet. The Internet grew out of research paid for by the United StatesDefenseDepartment in the 1960s and 1970s.As a result, the United States government still has .some control over it. In 1998, theCommerceDepartment set up a non-profit organization to supervise the domain name system of the Internet’’s World Wide WeB、The Web is a major service on the Internet. The group, based inCalifornia, is called the InternetCorporation forAssigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN.

A、domain name is a series of words separated by dots. It identifies an Internet Web site. ICANN operates a list of Web site owners and approves new endings for Web addresses, such as dot.com, dot.net or dot.gov. The group guarantees that Internet users around the world do not visit different Websites using the same Web address. For example, thanks to ICANN, a person inCuba will see the same www. unsv. com Website as someone inBelarus. ICANN also has some Internet policy powers. It can remove Web sites from the Internet. It also decides who can sell and list domain names. TheEuropean Onion,China,Brazil, India and other countries want the United States to release at least some control over the World Wide WeB、They believe that the Internet is an international resource that should be supervised by the United Nations or some other independent organization. TheBushAdministration disagrees. It says that ICANN is the best way to guarantee an open, secure and dependable online environment. Heavy governmental controls, it says, would suppress Internet growth and development. Hours before the start of the Tunis conference, negotiators agreed to leave day-to-day supervision of the Internet with ICANN. The compromise proposal from theEuropean Union calls for the creation next year of an international governance committee. Governments, businesses and organizations will be able to discuss public policy issues, including Internet crime, junk mail and viruses. The committee, however, will not have powers to make rules. The World Future Society estimated last year, the year of 2004, that about 950 million people around the world were using the Internet. That number is expected to rise to more than 1,000 million people within the next two years. Most Internet communication is business-to-business, instead of personal electronic mail.Buying and selling goods and services over the Internet is growing around the worlD、The World Future Society estimates that 2.7 million dollars was earned through Internet commerce in 2004.But, there are risks involved with this e-commerce. For example, the Federal TradeCommission estimates that more than 52,000 million dollars in goods and services were purchased last year through identity theft. Identity thieves steal personal information fromAmericans. They collect Social Security numbers, banking records and telephone numbers. They use this information to request loans, or to get credit cards in the name of the victim. Identity thieves often use computer viruses to collect a victim’’s personal information. They may also use spyware. These are programs that are loaded onto a computer without the owner’’s knowledge. Spyware follows the computer user’’s online activities. Identity thieves also use another method called Internet "phishing." These e-mail messages attempt to collect an Internet user’’s personal information, such as credit card numbers, by acting like a real business. People can protect themselves from identity theft in several ways.Anti-virus and anti-spyware computer programs can help. So can firewalls. These are programs or devices