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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."
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
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
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.
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?