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I'm Doug Johnson.

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And I'm Faith Lapidus with Explorations in VOA Special English. Today we tell about the Internet computer information system and its progress and problems.

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Last month, 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 States Defense Department in the nineteen sixties and seventies. As a result, the United States government still has some control over it. In nineteen ninety-eight, the Commerce Department 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 in California, is called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN.

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A domain name is a series of words separated by dots. It identifies an Internet Web site. ICANN also 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.