Gilberto Gil

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- U.S. control over how Internet addresses are assigned -- and thus how people around the world get access to e-mail and Web sites -- dominated discussions as a major U.N. conference on the Internet opened here Monday. Although few participants at the Internet Governance Forum attacked the United States directly, most were well aware of the role Americans play over domain name policies, including whether and how to assign suffixes in languages besides English.