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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.
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two organizations that get absolutely nothing done, meet. news at 11.
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Other critics say ICANN is too slow in making decisions and adopting new technology, like ways to transmit Chinese and Arabic characters. VeriSign has sued the organisation, saying it is standing in the way of lucrative new services.
I wonder if these same critics have paid any attention to just how quickly the UN moves on things. Yes it's an international body, but it also brings even more petty arguments to the table because of that. While ICANN's far from perfect, I doubt things would be any faster with the UN taking over, slower maybe, but not faster.From the article
"... whether the internet should be governed and, if so, how."
With all the problems that go on in the UN why are they a better choice then the US. The article has some valid points, but the current system is pretty fair.
Great people don't need people to complete them, great people complete other people. -- Matthew Pawlikowski.
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?
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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 other problem is that the UN is by no stretch of the imagination a "global government". It's a club for dictators to grand-stand while the powers from the end of WW II watch with their veto powers.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
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.
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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.
"International law is to law what professional wrestling is to wrestling; no one over the age of nine mistakes it for the real thing."
Time Magazine, opening line in an article about Somalia from 1993.
I'm not the original poster, but this is a big deal. The Iraqi oil-for-food program was by far the largest amount of money that the UN had ever handled. It dwarfed the rest of the UN's budget.
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(That said, I doubt Putin or Chirac were bribed. Like Bush, they had their own strong interests in the matter of Iraq and its government.)
Here are a few references. You can find plenty more on news.google.com
'Massive scam' in Iraqi oil program
Get to heart of UN role in Iraq Oil-for-Food scandal
Annan Pushes UN Council Members on Iraq Oil Scandal
3,000 UN Staffers Probed
Bulgaria's President Questioned over Iraq Oil Scandal