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AC - Al Gore's bill helped insure that the the NSFNET lived long enough to allow evolution into the commercial Intenet that we know today. The particular mechanism used for transition was NSF Solicition 93-52 which called for Network Access Points (NAP's). Without the additional funding provided as a result of Al Gore's efforts, there is a good question of whether today's Internet would have come into being.

The modern Internet was formed with the founding of the CIX in and the interconnection of ANS and the CIX (Thanks to Rick Adams, Bill Schrader, Susan Estrada, John Rugo, Steve Wolff and Mitch Kapor!) in 1991.

http://www.cookreport.com/p.part3.shtml.

That was the original intent. Today there's not much hierarchy. Whatever server "knows" .com has a more or less complete list of all the domain names. Ok, there's .edu, .net, .org, .mil, and country names, but .com is so much larger than effectively one database holds all the names.

When talking about things "ought to be", I'm suprised that so little is mentioned about introducing more heirarchy. Maybe another level of hierarchy is more than the average consumer's (joe sixpack user) limited mental model capacity can handle?

About the speed-up... does anyone else see this as an attempt to bypass the growing pressure they're under for having made such arbitrary decisions without any accountability for the basis behind them?

Maybe I'm overly suspicious... ICANN's got such a clean record, I'm sure they'd never do anything like...

• try anything underhanded and clearly against their own rules, or
• be accused of making inconsistent decisions based on ill-defined criteria
• cater to special interests of big business, or
• completely neglect legacy TLDs from alternate name servers

Originally the "Internet" was an aggregate of mostly Academic and Military organizations. The NSF (National Science Foundation) provided the backbone support until 1994 I believe (I may be wrong). Basically that means that the NSF controlled it and the organizations who paid for the net were the organizations that used it, Academic and military. Along the way it grew into something that could financially benefit (or in other words be abused) commercial interests. The comercialization of the net has sprouted new technology (Voice over IP) and grew technology that was originally never intended for "internetworking" (Java).

The cook report has monitored the economic aspects of the net since 1994.

Here's something that gives you a techy rundown of the physical aspect of the net and how the powers that be controlled it up until 1996.

You've got to understand too that it would have never become this popular unless a browser, Mosiac, came to be. Mosiac turned into Netscape after some time. Without this tool, you'd be limited to gophering around places (which wasn't bad in and of it self).

I dunno man, I can't see where you are going with the CD/DVD stuff. Of course you don't own the material on it. Just like you don't own my home page -- you can view it all you want, but is it yours? Can you copy it and say it's yours? No. The fundamentals of the Internet have behaved exactly as they should given the current owners and the like. You still have the capability to put up a page and you still have the ability to play on a level playing field with anyone who decides to use the internet as a tool for whatever -- it's not just banner ads out there, it's the information. You watch TV shows right - not TV commercials.

And I think that Personal Area Networks will over take the Internet as most important technology in lives -- only cause it will be so god damn fun to interact with your environment. There I predict it.

Damn, people haven't even intergrated spell-checkers into HTML elements -- there's still a long way to go with the current set up.

The Face -= o_O

The so called "at large membership" is merely
window dressing.

This article explains in painful detail who really controls ICANN.

ICANN is a scam.

ICANN has been rigged since it's inception. It exists solely to protect Trademark, Government,
and big business interests that conrol the board.

The facts have been painfully documented by Gordon Cook of the Cook Report Here, Here and regularly in his Monthly reports.

ICANN has been rigged since it's inception. It exists solely to protect Trademark, Government,
and big business interests that conrol the board.

The facts have been painfully documented by Gordon Cook of the Cook Report Here, Here and regularly in his Monthly reports.

ICANN has been rigged since it's inception. It exists solely to protect Trademark, Government,
and big business interests that conrol the board.

The facts have been painfully documented by Gordon Cook of the Cook Report Here, Here and regularly in his Monthly reports.

ICANN has been rigged since it's inception. It exists solely to protect Trademark, Government,
and big business interests that conrol the board.

The facts have been painfully documented by Gordon Cook of the Cook Report Here, Here and regularly in his Monthly reports.

This is YOUR internet. You can cast your vote today by how you configure your DNS settings.

Thousands of new domain names in a variety of new top level domains resolve here. The recently reported .GOD domain names resolve, as well as all the old .WEB names. Users of this alternate root include Gordon Cook (Cook Report on the Internet).

For more information, check out:

http://support.open-rsc.org/How_To/
http://www.superroot.org/

Is it really "worth a try"? In it's short history (18 months), ICANN has shown at every turn that it prefers vacuous PR about "transparency," "bottom-up governance," and "consensus" to the messy facts of actually functioning according to those ideals. By signing up for At-large Membership -- a body that has no direct power whatsoever within ICANN's policy-defining structure -- you give ICANN grounds for claiming that it's listening to netizens. ICANN has managed to outmaneuver and circumvent hundreds of people who've been involved in net-governance processes for decades; what makes you think it won't be able to diddle thousands of ill-informed newbies?

For some history of ICANN's hijinks, take a look at the long essays by Gordon Cook, an expert on telecom issues: What's Behind ICANN (Sept 1999) and ICANN Internet Takeover" (June 1999). "ICANN Watch" is another good resource for learning about ICANN's dubious dealings, though it hasn't been updated much lately. For an explanation of the strange circumstances under which ICANN passed the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy before its board was elected, see this short "roving reporter" column and Keith Dawson's excellent chronology of the DNS debates. And here's a summary of some critical views of ICANN from a conference last fall.

There are lots more resources. If you plan to "get involved," you'd do well to know what you're getting involved with. But if you think your voice will be heard, you've got another thing coming. Don't believe me? Here's ICANN's organizational chart.

Is it really "worth a try"? In it's short history (18 months), ICANN has shown at every turn that it prefers vacuous PR about "transparency," "bottom-up governance," and "consensus" to the messy facts of actually functioning according to those ideals. By signing up for At-large Membership -- a body that has no direct power whatsoever within ICANN's policy-defining structure -- you give ICANN grounds for claiming that it's listening to netizens. ICANN has managed to outmaneuver and circumvent hundreds of people who've been involved in net-governance processes for decades; what makes you think it won't be able to diddle thousands of ill-informed newbies?

For some history of ICANN's hijinks, take a look at the long essays by Gordon Cook, an expert on telecom issues: What's Behind ICANN (Sept 1999) and ICANN Internet Takeover" (June 1999). "ICANN Watch" is another good resource for learning about ICANN's dubious dealings, though it hasn't been updated much lately. For an explanation of the strange circumstances under which ICANN passed the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy before its board was elected, see this short "roving reporter" column and Keith Dawson's excellent chronology of the DNS debates. And here's a summary of some critical views of ICANN from a conference last fall.

There are lots more resources. If you plan to "get involved," you'd do well to know what you're getting involved with. But if you think your voice will be heard, you've got another thing coming. Don't believe me? Here's ICANN's organizational chart.

or for a lengthy critique of ICANN see Gordon Cook's report on ICANN at http://www.cookreport.com/icannregulate.shtml