RIPE NCC Responds to ICANN CEO's Proposal

An anonymous reader sends in: "RIPE NCC (the European IP address registry) responds to the ICANN proposals for reducing their own accountability even further whilst spending millions of everyone else's money." ICANN will be meeting next week in Ghana - ought to be a feisty meeting.

Comments

Well at least someone's likely to get attention..

[dagoalieman]

It seems to me this could be a good thing, to open up the full flood gates of complaints towards ICANN. I mean seriously, I think almost every organization affiliated with them, plus many of us (cough /.) is just about fed up with them and some of the not quite brilliant things they're doing.

Let's just hope this gets something rolling, because obviously our voices are next to unheard.

ICANN should have been gone long ago

[afidel]

When they refused to create the .XXX TLD they showed complete disregard for the future of the net as a self regulating entity. If they had created an .XXX TLD then we could banish net nany, cyber sitter, government intervention "to protect the children" and many other anoyances in one easy swoop.

Re:ICANN should have been gone long ago

[thesolo]

Hear, hear!

Jesse Berst first began talking about the ICANN and the .XXX domain proposal back in the spring & summer of 99. I remember thinking to myself, "Man, that is a great idea, I wonder why no one thought of it before."

And yet, nothing came of it. Moving adult content to a .XXX server would be ideal for so many reasons, I fail to see why they wouldn't do anything with it. Is there any way to get that movement started back up?

an issue of fault tolerance...

[dj_whitebread]

Binding them contractually to one entity, ICANN, would create a single point of failure, possibly subject to capture.

This is a fabulous point. From a technical standpoint, one of the fault tolerance features of the internet is its inherent sense of "multiple backups." Abstracting this to the organizational side, it becomes clear that to put all of the power into one group's hands is a weakness. There should be one standard way of doing things, but several different groups doing it.

My biggest annoyance with the ICANN

[Kiwi]

My personal biggest annoyance with the ICANN is that they have been dragging their feet with regard to support for internationalized characters in domain names. The problem is this: Domain names traditionally only had English language letters [A-Za-z] and the '-' symbol as part of domain names. (The '.' character signifies a delimiter in domain name labels; it isn't there in the DNS packet sent over the wire.)

The problem with this is that this has a western-centric point of view which does not take in to account the writing systems that foreign languages use.

Now, the ICANN was in a position to officially push forward some specification, any specification to allow international characters in domain names. Unfortunatly, they were too busy spending million of dollars on international conferences, staying in five star hotels, to actually do anything about this problem.

International domain labels work right now with current DNS servers and DNS client software. One can type in, say español.example.com in Mozilla, and MaraDNS, not to mantion DjbDNS, will correctly resolve this domain name. The trick: Mozilla uses UTF-8 to encode international characters in domain names, and both MaraDNS and DjbDNS can handle domain names with UTF-8 characters.

- Sam

Re:Uh...Ghana?

[qslack]

Maybe it's to foster the growth of the Internet in Ghana?

Imagine how much richer the Internet would be with a whole new set of opinions from Africans and members of other countries that are currently too poor to offer their citizens the Internet.

Not everyone in Africa is starving, some live like "normal" people. The Internet might just bring in commerce to end the starvation in Africa, too.

It's not completely pointless to meet in Ghana!