The US will maintain control of the domain-name system that guides traffic around the Internet under an agreement adopted today at a United Nations technology summit.
Negotiators at the World Summit on the Information Society said they will set up a new forum to discuss "spam" e-mail and other Internet issues and explore ways to narrow the technology gap between rich and poor countries.
But oversight of the domain name system will remain with the United States, a setback for the European Union and other countries that had pushed for international control of one of the most important technical aspects of the Internet.
However individual countries will have greater control over their own domains, such as China's .cn or Ireland's .ie.
The summit was launched two years ago with a focus on bringing technology to the developing world, but US control of the domain-name system had become a sticking point for countries like Iran and Brazil, who argued that it should be managed by the United Nations or some other global body.
The Internet is co-ordinated by a private sector organisation called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), which was set up by the Clinton administration in 1998.
Many developing countries see Icann as a symbol of American capitalism and are uneasy that a resource they see as vital to their economic development is under the control of US private interests.
Until 1998, the Internet was overseen almost exclusively a computer science professor at the University of Southern California. John Postel was among the handful of engineers who built the Internet for the US department of defence in the 1960s and managed it on behalf of the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Icann is run by a 15-member board and is registered in California.