TUNIS, Nov 16: The United States will keep control of the domain-name system that guides online traffic under an agreement on Wednesday seen as a setback to efforts to internationalize one of the pillars of the Internet.

Negotiators at the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society said they had agreed to set up a 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.

The European Union said in a statement that the agreement would lead to ‘further internationalization of Internet governance, and enhanced intergovernmental cooperation to this end’.

“In the short term, US oversight is not immediately challenged, but in the long term they are under the obligation to negotiate with all the states about the future and evolution of Internet governance,” said a member of the EU delegation.

The US said the agreement essentially endorses the status quo.

“There’s nothing new in this document that wasn’t already out there before,” said Ambassador David Gross, the head of the US delegation.

“We have no concerns that it could morph into something unsavoury,” he said about the forum.

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 United States argued that such a body would stifle innovation with red tape. The EU in recent months had sought to reach a compromise between the two sides.