Slashdot Mirror
ICANN Meets Annan
CypherOz writes "The Australian reports a meeting between ICANN chief Twomey and Kofi Annan and the role the UN may play in the naming game. " We've talked about this before as well.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
How much could the U.N. actually do that the U.S. isn't doing now? I understand the appearance issue - this way it might have a bit more international legitimacy, but realistically, on a practical level, I don't see much coming out of this. The language compatibility thing is interesting, and that could possibly turn out better when working through the U.N., but I'm skeptical. To me it all sounds like a bunch of dippy diplomats are talking about something they don't understand. But wait - isn't that the U.N.'s new mission?
-
I just hope that if the UN gets involved, they come in against Verisign and any other large businesses who wish to screw with things. I'm not all for the UN controlling things, mind you. But if they do have some say, I hope its on the side of reason and open standards and fair, reasonable practices.
Actually the real question would be would the UN have any actual POWER to enforce the rules they set. They don't have much power now, so UN mandates get ignored quite often when it's convenient, so Verisign would probably just do what it wanted and ignore the UN mandates. It could actually end up being much WORSE than it is now.The best thing anyone can do (ICANN included) is leave the internet the hell alone.
... the irony is that the internet is already too international for some countries.
...
The last thing we need is an international body trying to make us subject to all the laws in the world, in spite of the contradictions in law everywhere...
For example, I wonder how many sites discussing the history of WW II would be allowed? Germany has some pretty strict laws about anything relating to the Nazis. It's not particularly clear to me that you could even, say, cite Hitler's writings or show pictures of historical artifacts without running afoul of it, even should you (rightfully!) condemn the horrible things that happened during that war.
Besides, we already have countries fencing in their own little bits of the internet (first China, now France as I understand it... probably others, soon)
That said, DNS probably could be a bit smarter about, say, using unicode instead of ASCII for URLs... Though I have to wonder just how confusing that might make things if there are now who knows how many glyphs that all look too similar (new avenues for typosquatters, no doubt)
Not to derail, but please remember that the UN is not an elected body. Here in the West, we hold as self-evident the idea that legitimate government can only arise out of the will of the people. The various ambassadors and ministers that make up the UN General Assembly and Security Council are not elected, either directly or indirectly.
The United Nations is not and cannot be a world government. It's not a government at all. It lacks the legitimate authority to govern anything.
I don't wanna get into a big thing here. I just want to be clear on this.