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ICANN Updates

Posted by michael on from the .organized-resistance dept.

ICANN is meeting in Bucharest next week, which means they're floating all their usual smoky-room schemes just prior to the meeting. leto writes "The three RIR's, ARIN, APNIC and RIPE-NCC have just released a joint statement that basically tells ICANN that their Evolution and Reform plan is unacceptable, and tells ICANN to go play elsewhere, and leave the address space in the hands of the well working bodies." An interesting mailing list debate has been going on between ICANN's critics and ICANN's extremely well-paid and extremely sleazy attorney: critic, attorney (sleazy!), critic again, another critic, attorney again, critic's response, still other critics. And finally, note that the .org TLD is up for bids - the New York Times has a story, Newsforge has another.

3 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. politics by OpenMind(tm) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We also know that a purely private organization, without the support and
    involvement of governments from around the world, will not be able to carry
    out thes mission assigned to ICANN (if you believe that mission requires
    the agreed participation of all the relevant infrastructure
    providers). ICANN has no guns, and no soldiers; it has no coercive
    power.

    Something tell me before too long we can expect to hear dark rumors of ICANN building a droid army to deploy against the shining republic of the IETF.

    Seriously, though, it is shocking how poitical they can try to make a system whose entire job is to associate names and numbers. For something that is essentially a hack (put the fate of the internet on the backs of a handfule of individual servers, yeah, good idea), they sure seem intent on turning it into the basis for a UN-scale political swamp.

  2. Re:What needs to happen... by swm · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Every decision about assigning IP addresses to corresponding web addresses should be democratically made by the net-community.

    How about

    Every decision about assigning IP addresses to corresponding web addresses should made by the individual who wants to access the web site.
    To access a web site, type its IP address. If you don't like typing IP addresses, build a database. If you don't have the time/inclination to build your own database, subscribe to one.

    It's not a technical problem. It's not even an implementation problem. All popular operating systems allow you to specify the IP address of your DNS server, and there are already alternate DNS servers out there. If you don't like ICANN's, find another.

    Go for anarchy and ICANN becomes a non-issue.

  3. Repeating myself by catfood · · Score: 5, Informative

    Nobody's yet explained why it takes a raft of lawyers, eighty million dollars, and meetings all over the world to accomplish what Jon Postel did in his spare time on his office workstation.

    The Internet has gotten bigger, but damitall, IP addresses are still IP addresses and DNS is supposed to be a hierarchical, delegated system. What's the big problem? Jon just ran a root server and kept backups like it was the most obvious and natural thing in the world. What else is there to do?