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VeriSign and Other Registry Giants Blast ICANN

Posted by timothy on from the struggle-in-the-primordial-soup dept.

rhwalker22 writes: "VeriSign, ENIC, and Nominet UK today released a letter to the U.S. Commerce Dept. urging Uncle Sam to 'scale back the powers of the body that manages the Internet's global addressing system,' according to this report on washingtonpost.com. ICANN, of course, has its own take on the Registries' letter..."

5 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. Don't trust 'em by Nanite · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm not a huge fan of ICANN (is anyone?) but I'm distrustful of verisign even more. Anything that Verisign wants is probably not in our best interests. Could this be a power grab?

    --
    God is real unless declared integer.
  2. Favorite Quote by cdrudge · · Score: 3, Interesting
    "A registry by definition has a monopoly, so they all have a common interest in preserving individual monopolistic practices, so they don't want to be accountable to anybody," Lynn said.
    Hmmm....replace registry with ICANN and it still hold true!
  3. Pot. Kettle. Black. by davebooth · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Does anyone but me find it ironic that the most influential gripe about ICANN is coming from the registries that gained most benefit from ICANNs excesses? Of course they only gripe about the price cap since this is one of the few ICANN policies that bites the registries harder than it does the domain owners.

    The registries are as evil as ICANN in their own way. The only spark of interest in this is that Nominet joined the party - Having dealt with administering domains in .com, .ac.uk and .co.uk I found that of the new crop of domain barons, Nominet were the most true to the way it used to be. (probably because when they took over .uk the fastest backbones in the UK were still in the hands of the academics, so they messed with .ac.uk at their peril)

    --
    I had a .sig once. It got boring.
  4. Authority? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What I don't understand is why ICCAN has authority over the whole international dns system. That made sense when the internet was all in the usa, but it is now international. It seems to me that the US congress lacks the legal jurisdiction to give ICCAN the authority it has.

    The only really legal way to set up such an organization would be by international treaty. You could make it part of the International Telecommunications Union or the United Nations, or set it up independently. Maybe someone should challange ICCAN in international court, or through the WTO, to get its international power stripped away.

  5. ICANN'T by psicE · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why does the US feel that it should own the Internet?

    Countries have different laws. That's a fact, and a good thing; I don't think anybody wants that Hague treaty that lets people sue Swedish porn producers in Saudi Arabia, for example. So having global domains only invites problems.

    A French's company may have .com domains, but their corporate site will be at .fr. Similar for Japan, Germany, Britain, Canada, Australia, and pretty much every company in the world. Only the US, with a virtually nonexistent .us domain, has all its companies have .com domains.

    What we really need to do is eliminate the three-letter TLD, and have every single domain name end in a country code. Then. as part of getting a domain, the owner agrees to abide by the laws of the country controlling the domain, and no other laws.

    Whether ICANN exists or not, the US government tries to enforce its laws on the whole of the Internet. By more clearly enforcing existing political boundaries on the Web, all sorts of disputes can be resolved and avoided.