The internet is still under the control of the United States, participants at a governance forum said, despite a move by America to loosen its grip over the private corporation that administers it.

An agreement in September between the US Commerce Department and Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers created panels to review the work of ICANN in key areas, in a move designed to bring more accountability to the body.

But delegates at the Internet Governance Forum, which closed on Wednesday in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, said the body still exercised too much control and some called for it to be replaced with a international one.

"The US still has a strong stake in ICANN, as far as stakeholderism is concerned," Keisuke Kamimura, senior researcher at the Center for Global Communications, International University of Japan, told AFP.

"Regarding accountability and transparency, they have identified it as an issue to be reviewed, but more needs to be done," he said.

"The US still has a key to the back door" when it comes to internet administration, Kamimura said.

Scrap it altogether?

The review panels will include representatives of governments other than the United States, in response to calls for making the body more global.

Fuad Bajwa, a member of the United Nations IGF Multistakeholder Advisory Group and a member of ICANN told the forum the developing world needed to be more strongly represented.

"We, the people of the developing world, are there," Bajwa said.

"From my experience in ICANN, I saw less staff members from my part of the world," said the Pakistani delegate. "I saw less board members from the developing world."

One Chinese civil society group called for the body to be scrapped altogether.

"We want to have an international organisation under the framework of the United Nations to replace ICANN," said Chencqing Huang, head of the Internet Society of China.

A California-based non-profit corporation, ICANN manages the Domain Name System (DNS) that forms the technical backbone of the Web and allows website addresses, for example, to be typed as words instead of a series of numbers.

Since 1998, ICANN has operated under an agreement with the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

ICANN says it is a multistakeholder body.