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Texas Company's Legal Troubles Hold .iq In Limbo
aducore writes "According to The Inquirer, the (American) company running the Iraqi .iq domain name .iq is under criminal indictment and cannot transfer control. So no Iraqi organization can get a .iq domain name, including the government. Iraq's National Communications and Media Commission and the U.S. administrator in Iraq are trying to get ICANN to free up the domain."
Its not the American government holding it up. If you actually RTFA (yeah, I know, too much to ask these days), America is trying to get the TLD back from ICANN.
Oh wait, this is what we called ignorance on Slashdot, where reading a simple article is too hard.
Shouldn't have this been in the control of at least some kind of Iraqi authority in the first place?
.iq being held by a private American company is perfectly logical. They've been busy privatizing Iraq - selling off previously government owned industries, mostly to their friends and family.
In the Neocon world, the
Conspiracy theories aside, there is nothing unusual in a country outsourcing the management of its ccTLD, although usually the outsourcing goes from the 2nd/3rd world to the 1st instead of the other way around. Libya's .ly ccTLD is run by a company based in the UK for example. Plus, we have the blatent commercialisation of ccTLD domains like ".tv" that happen to have meaning in one language or another. Usually the government of the country concerned will retain some modicum of control and first dibs on second level domains, but this is not always the case.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
From TFA:
|According to a report from AP, the problem started
|in 1997, when Saddam Hussein's dictatorship was
|blocking access to the Internet.
|An ICANN body granted responsibility for the ".iq"
|domain to InfoCom a Texas-based company and
|purveyor of computers and Web services in the Middle East.
So they gave it to them because the rulers of Iraq did not allow internet access at the time.
Tobias
The full text of this article from The Economist follows. The original content is subscriber-only; it is reproduced here in the hope and expectation that you will find it useful.
--
Rebuilding Iraq
Without peace, reconstruction stalls
May 13th 2004 | BAGHDAD
From The Economist print edition
Why it is proving so hard to rebuild the country
[Image]
IF THE Americans left Iraq today, their most obvious physical legacy, in the eyes of ordinary Iraqis, would be concrete blocks. The big slabs protecting administrators, soldiers and contractors from the 30-odd countries in the ruling coalition, which is due to be dissolved at the end of June in favour of an interim government run by Iraqis, jut into Baghdad's main roads and often reduce traffic in the capital to a standstill. Meanwhile, as the violence sputters on, the country's reconstruction--witness, for example, its communications system--is a shambles.
The insurgency, aimed at America's foreign and Iraqi contractors as much as the soldiers of occupation, is largely to blame. Last month 90 foreigners were kidnapped, prompting Russia, Portugal, Poland and France to urge their nationals to go home. Another bomb this week targeted a Baghdad hotel full of contractors. Kellogg Brown & Root, which has won the biggest building contracts in the new Iraq, has seen 34 of its staff killed, a higher toll than has been sustained by the military forces of any of America's allies bar Britain's.
Security squads and the protection of buildings, along with insurance and the soaring costs of transport on dangerous roads, account for as much as 30% of the costs of some of the companies trying to set up in business. The Californian building and engineering giant, Bechtel, which is handling contracts with the Agency for International Development (USAID) worth around $2 billion, has pulled half of its staff out to neighbouring Jordan and Kuwait and has assigned two Gurkha bodyguards to each of its 33 expatriates left in Baghdad. After last month's insurrections in Fallujah, to the west, and in Shia towns to the south, many of its key people have, for the time being, gone.
An official at the planning ministry, which oversees Iraq's reconstruction effort, says that productivity has slumped virtually to nil. When the militia of a rebel Shia firebrand, Muqtada al-Sadr, swooped through towns to the south of Baghdad, water, sewage-treatment and other projects were abandoned to scavengers, who stripped plants of machinery. Other than looters, the beneficiaries have been the 20,000-odd men working for security companies. They have blurred the lines between civilian and military contractors. Both are targets of the insurgents.
As the summer heat rises, many essentials are getting scarcer. The schools are still open and exams held on time. But after months of regular electricity at night, long power cuts have become frequent again, plunging the capital into darkness and increasing crime. Promises that by next month the country's output would have risen from 4,500 to 6,000 megawatts (the amount a biggish American town consumes) look unlikely to be kept, especially since all of Siemens's specialists and most of General Electric's have left. This week another Russian engineer was killed and two more kidnapped at a power plant, prompting a further flight of foreigners.
In their effort to achieve as smooth a handover as possible to Iraqis at the end of June, the American authorities are letting their generals make deals with the rebels to get the show back on the road. In Fallujah, the hottest cauldron of Sunni hostility, the marines have lifted their siege, leaving the insurgents to run the town's security; they have even staged a joint patrol. In Shia towns, including the holiest, Najaf, General Martin Dempsey has offered to tur
Well, i'm in Iraq now, and the infrastructure is in poor shape in many areas, but the cities are getting around 4-16 hours of electricty each day and fresh water is available in most areas too....the main roads and highways are mostly ok too, some potholes, but i've seen worse in ohio and pennsylvania!...there is however a booming (no pun intended) computer market in baghdad, and there's been a couple of reporters who mentioned they can get some kind of dsl service there at like 256k....there's also a linux users group at http://www.iraqilinux.org/...u only hear the bad things on the news, but we (the iraqis and us) have been able to reopen like 1200 schools, the hospitals, and even the colleges. Entrepreneurs are opening up shops again, and they should get their IQ domain back....
In
Well, boo hoo. This is about Iraq, not the US legal system. If InfoCom wants to get pissy about it who cares?
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
``What Hamas does is targeted agains innocent civilian population. What Israeli Army does is targeted agains Hamas.''
You are right in saying that civilians shouldn't be the target. However, there are more things to consider. First, terrorists, unlike governments, have severy limited means. Targeting civilians is that much easier than targeting heavily guarded government and military targets.
Also, it's not like Israeli (or USAmerican) actions don't affect civilians, either. The wall that Israel has been building, as well as the strict checks that palestinians are subjected to severely hamper the normal lives of many palestinians. The US, for its part, has installed dictators in many countries in South America and the Middle East. These dictators oppress and sometimes murder civilians.
Finally, since Israel and the USA are democracies, there really is something to be said for targetting civilians. They supposedly elected the goverment, so they apparently endorse its crimes. Of cours, it doesn't _really_ work that way, but at least some of the civilians won't be that innocent. Even those who don't approve of the actions of their government still support them by paying taxes. And they could move (at least, most of them), as opposed to many of the terrorists, who usually don't earn enough to live a decent live, much less move abroad.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
What existing entries? The .iq TLD was deactivated some time ago, and currently doesn't appear to exist at all except on paper.
Perhaps so, but it looks like some domains were, in fact, registered. I'm sure there's a lot more than the twenty some-odd entries indexed by Google and someone paid for 'em.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
For the same reason Iraqi oil is controlled by american companies.
Who modded this insightful?
The practice is the same all over the middle east. A foreign company leases an oilfield from the government for a set number of years, and pays them a fee per barrel extracted. At no time does control over the oil transfer from the government to a company until the oil is sold on the open market. If a company misbehaves, its lease can be cancelled and it'll be stuck with a pile of equipment on someone elses land that it had better shift sharpish so someone else can use the field.
Also, the proceeds from Iraqi oil are presently going into a trust fund, which will be spent on rebuilding. That fund isn't growing as quickly as it ought as local terrorists are intent on cutting the volumes.
But Iraq didn't choose to outsource its domain. ICANN made the decision for them. Abhorrent as censorship is, did they have the right to do that? Should a body like ICANN be involved in politics?
.iq domain had to go somewhere (Iraq simply wasn't interested in internet access). I suppose ICANN could have sat on the name, but I don't think it is in their charter to manage top level domains, so they put it out to bid. I'd say judging on what happened, ICANN was doing their best just to stay out of it.
No, but they should be involved in domain name registration. At the time this happend (if you'd bothered to read the article), Iraq was blocking all internet access to the country and so stewardship of the
Just gonna post this here since it would address about 40 posts.
From CNN reports about Infocom, it seems that the primaries at the company were "Ghassan Elashi, 49; Bayan Elashi, 47; Basman Elashi, 46; and Hazim Elashi, no age given."
Remember, kids - living in Texas != American, and since said Texans are now awaiting sentencing on charges of illegal export of computer equipment and funding Hamas, I'm pretty sure they are *not*, in fact, friends of Dubya.
Now mod this up to +5 informative so those jackasses down there will see it.
Cheers,
Craig
Corollary to Clarke's Third Law: Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Maybe it's not so much a question of priorities but just that the media is getting tired of reporting news of bombings, shootouts and beheadings?
The media will never tire of bombings, shootouts or beheadings. At least until the next high profile celebrity criminal case or politician-based sex scandal.
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
and paying for the US military expenses.
Are they? I mean, do you have any sort of reference for money from the trust fund going into the Pentagon's budget? Or is this just what Michael Moore told you to think?