European ccTLDs To ICANN: "We Won't Pay!"

Thirty European country-code Top Level Domain operators have gotten together and told ICANN they won't pay the full amount of dues that ICANN says they owe. (NYT article, free reg. req.) Not good news for ICANN -- when you owe someone $100, you have a problem, but when you owe someone $1,000,000, they have a problem. The domain-name operators see ICANN as a U.S., not international, organization, and worry that their "tenuous and largely undefined" relationship with ICANN allows the latter to reassign curatorship of their domain-name databases -- as has already once been attempted.

Comments

Re:Good!

[Ed Avis]

It could provide a haven for people to run their own domains without being sued by the likes of Mattel. What a disaster that would be.

The nerve!

[G-Man]

Damn you Europeans and the Vespas you rode in on! Don't you know we're the only ones allowed to not pay dues to international organizations!

I need to switch to decaf...

ICANN still in bed with NSI

[Anonymous Coward]

On the 10th June this year, Domain registrations all around the world will have to be put on hold for over 12 hours by ICANN, because NSI are upgrading their systems.

That is right - You cannot register a domain because ONE American corporation is updating their systems. ICANN are powerless against the might of NSI, and most people think that NSI (those people that value your domain so much that they will take it back at the drop of a hat and don't have any security over changes to any domain name) should be banned from being a registrar.

The Internet might have originated in America (probably designed by people all around the world though), but it is now a world-wide phenomenon, and should be treated as such. Countries shouldn't have to suck up to an American company or organisation to manage their TLD for them - the TLD should be owned by the people of the country it represents, and a non-profit organisation should administer all domain names (i.e., charge people for the admin charges and running costs for a domain name, but not any more - like Nominet in the UK). People can then resell these domains for profit, but provide services with them.

NSI are the bad boys at the root of this all.

++++++++++
Eating the Earth beneath our Feet

Look to the contract

[hardaker]

Always look to the contract. I'm sure ICANN is obligated to honor previous contracts before it existed. What does the contract say with respect to fees that need to be paid?

Or, if they've signed a contract with ICANN already then they've probably already agreed to the prices. If they signed a contract that stated the prices would be arbitrarily set by ICANN without advanced notification, then maybe they should have thought a bit before signing it.

Or, they could attempt to form a new organization that promotes its own root level domain names and convince the rest of the world to point to them for them. The choice is theirs.

Re:Appropriate Forum For Creation Of ICANN-like Bo

[jbarnett]

Does anyone have a suggestion as to an appropriate place where the countries of the world should have met to discuss the creation of an ICANN-like body?

I would recommened Denny's, they are open 24 hours, have great coffee, and you can order breakest, lunch or dinner at any type of the day or night!

Chinese Hegemony

[Plasmic]

" Then, there's the physical network. You don't HAVE to use the backbone routers to connect to others, or vice versa. Anyone can build their own backbone and provide access to anyone on the Internet."

Just out of curiousity, do you have any idea what you're talking about? Let's see.. you went on to say,

"With a rapid increase in distributed projects, cheap home networking, etc, the very notion of a 'backbone' is doomed, in the long run. It's just a matter of when."

Umm.. alrighty. It seems apparent from your post that you think that all traffic on the Internet backbone passes through ICANN (that's non-sensical) or that the existance of some specific Internet backbone is key to its functionality.

"I'd say that ICANN, AT&T and Bell have a LOT to worry about..

I think most people would agree that there isn't an "Internet backbone" as most laymen probably conceptualize in their head. That is, there isn't one big piece of fiber that everything passes across before it can go anywhere else. Given the number of autonomous systems (as in BGP), the notion that AT&T and Bell (or even the bigger providers at large interconnection points such as mae-east/west) somehow rule the Net is nothing more than a misconception.

The basis of your post is that there is centralized control over name services and that if that centralized control is lost, then the centralized control over the physical network will be lost. The premise of the latter part of this statement, that there is some centralized physical network, is entirely incorrect. For example, European Internet traffic probably doesn't pass through the United States en route to South Africa (not to say that it couldn't; I'm just pointing out that there's no friggin' global backbone, per se). Decentralized name services could be designed in such a way that they would be just fine and the Internet is already decentralized, physically and logically, for the scope of this discussion.

Conclusion: This isn't setting a precedent for a chaotic global communications breakdown. It's just the next logical step along the road to virtual nirvana.

Re:Give ".fr" to someone else?

[anticypher]

That was what ICANN proposed in a meeting recently. .fr is run by INRIA, the french government's network research agency (l'Institut National du Recherche en Informatique et Automatique). It seemed a logical choice when Jon Postel handed out control of the TLDs. INRIA is a mix of altruistic university researchers and profit seeking business interests, but they are overseen by the government's research and economy ministries, and operate for the good of french citizens.

But now the ICANN is proposing yanking TLD control from not-for-profit and government agencies, and giving it to any private company who will sign a binding contract ensuring for-profit operation with a percentage going to ICANN and Network Solutions.

It would be a wry bit of poetic justice to see .fr administered by a british or american company, but do we really want that? The french sure don't.

This issue is one of control, in the absence of any formal agreements. There has been an informal agreement since Jon Postel created the whole domain system, which has been to promote the usefulness of the internet. Now commercial interests would like to destroy that informal agreement, and create an inflexible formal one which promotes only profitability with the flow of money heading back towards whoever controls the root of the DNS tree. Freedom be damned, and ignore sovereignity of other countries to do what they please.

This should lead to a breakup of the current system in the next few years. With any luck, the commercial internet will collapse into obscurity, and the freedom craving internet will flourish with new, open, technological innovation. So get hacking!

the AC

URL without Login

[Rabenwolf]

You can get there without logging in here .

You may flame now.

Re:This could be a disaster....

[jd]

The Europeans don't need American DNS servers. A big RAID drive, and one DNS dump later, and the entire ICANN system is automagically mirrored in safer waters.

And if the systems were set to block domain transfers to Europe? Suddenly, European businesses would re-discover the European markets, and the US can go to hell in a handbasket.

The US name servers only have power over Europe IF:

1. Europeans want to visit US sites
2. The European name servers can't obtain the mappings for themselves (legally or otherwise)
3. A central European name service can't out-compete ICANN in pricing
4. The IP numbers can't be re-mapped effectively to a new set of names (this would require a translator, at one of the transatlantic gateways)
5. The US Government puts economic pressure on Europe to comply with internal US decisions.

If a single one of these fails to stand, then the EU will be liberated from US influence and be free to run their own nameservers without interference from ICANN and with no regard to historical power bases.

This could be a disaster....

[jd]

....for ICANN and other mega-corporations on the Internet. When one group seizes back control of something ICANN never had authority to have in the first place, it can't be long before others do the same.

If/when resource discovery makes it into the name servers, centralized control will simply cease to exist. And why limit it to name servers? IPv6 makes provision for decentralized IP numbering.

Then, there's the physical network. You don't HAVE to use the backbone routers to connect to others, or vice versa. Anyone can build their own backbone and provide access to anyone on the Internet.

With a rapid increase in distributed projects, cheap home networking, etc, the very notion of a "backbone" is doomed, in the long run. It's just a matter of when.

All in all, I'd say that ICANN, AT&T and Bell have a LOT to worry about. Either they rule an Empire, as malevolent co-dictators, or they're sidelined, forgotten and broke.

It does behave like a US institution

[Docrates]

I headed my country's relationship with ICANN for a while and let me tell you, if it wasn't because I've worked with American companies all my life I would have NEVER been able to work with nor understand ICANN. I can see why other countries feel like this is a US organization imposing fees to other countries. Hmm, well, now that i think about it, IT IS!. sure there's the at large. sure, they meet in places like cancun, and sure there are people from all over the world in there, but let's be realistic: the Internet was invented by scientists and engineers in the US, and was spread initially by US lead acedemia at first and by mostly US based companies more recently. it's now used by everyone and their middle class cousins, but there's GOT to be a centralized way of handling domains (eventually resolving will come to this one place, otherwise it would be chaos(was that.com resovled by the australia server? oh but it wasn't synchronized to the gualalunpur server!...)). So now they have to pay. Now, is the amount fair? I dunno...

just my 0.02Kb
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