US renews ICANN deal
p2pnet.net News:- America will retain effective control of the Net’s addressing systems until 2011.
ICANN has renewed its contract with the United States Department of Commerce for up to five years, despite complaints that the relationship politicizes what should be a neutral global computer network.
“The renewed agreement covers many but not all of the functions performed by the agency, whose full name is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers,” continues The New York Times.
“Icann is still negotiating with the department to renew a broader agreement between them, known as a memorandum of understanding. Both the contract and the memorandum were due to expire on Sept. 30.”
In the last year its role has become, “more contentious as more organisations have demanded a say in the way it makes its decisions,” says the BBC, adding:
“Icann has rejected a proposal to create a porn-only domain, .xxx, and some suspect that politics played a role in the decision. In July 2006, an official from the US Department of Commerce said it was still ‘committed’ to turning Icann into a private organisation” but now, “Any moves towards Icann becoming independent may not now take place until 2011.”
Also See:
The New York Times – Overseer of Domain Names Renews Contract, August 16, 2006
BBC – Net’s ruling body renews US links, August 16, 2006
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August 19th, 2006 at 8:06 am
The questions that people need to ask is this:
1. Do we want countries like Lebanon, Syria, and North Korea have a say in how the net is governed? How about Cuba or China for that matter?
2. If a country like China gets ahold of it, they could block out anything at will by unregistering the, what they deem as offensive, pornographic, subversive, or controversial, domain name that is hosting the content.
I think that technical control of the net such as domain names, IP addresses, technical standards, etc. should be left as is. After all, when Verisign tried to hijack all the queries that would have returned a NXDOMAIN and redirected it to a website, it broke alot of things. This happened a few years ago in fact. I remember that because I was affected by Verisign’s little stunt.
August 21st, 2006 at 7:52 am
If ICANN (& IANA) is not going to operate under the auspices of the US DoC, the UN stands ready and willing to scarf it right up. In fact they are drooling at the prospect.
While the US Government might be a big control freak, just image how internet Governance would operate under the corrupt, bloated bureaucracy of the UN.
–TG
PS: By ‘corrupt’, I don’t mean it in the criminal sense. I mean ‘corrupt’ as in serving the needs of the bureacracy first, instead of serving the interests of the constituents they are supposed to be providing services to in order to enable those constituents to go about their business efficiently and productively.