Should the UN Replace ICANN?

An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo news has a story on how some developing countries want control of the assignment of network names and numbers turned over to an international body, such as the UN's ITU (International Telecommunication Union)."

Comments

Conference

[locarecords.com]

I remember attending the Politics of Code conference in the UK in 2003 and hearing Richard Hill from International Telecommunication Union giving a very odd speech about the ITU and international regulation of the Internet etc. At the time I thought it was a coded land-grab for the transfer of control of ICANN to the ITU.

ICANN was also still in a confusing semi-democratic phase at the time (this seems to be steadily decreasing) and also weirdly self-imploding. Ester Dyson also gave the most contentless speech I think I have ever heard - no doubt to ensure minimum offense to anyone in the audience.

As with all these things wheels within wheels... but I do wish the call for some form of ICANN democracy would renew rather than lose it to a not very democratic body (i.e. the ITU) or to the corporations (kinda where it is now).

The ITU... ugh.

[jd]

CCITT/ITU has some good points. The X.500 standard for labelling directory information has become a fairly established standard. Or, at least, some of it. X.25 for slow serial is actually pretty decent. And their older modem standards for Europe were very acceptable.

The first problem is that they are hardly open. They charge a LOT for any of their documentation, which is split into many, many books. Unless you start off as rich as Bill Gates, you're unlikely to ever get enough of the texts to actually know what the standard even is.

The second is that they operate in a manner that resembles a medieval court. I half expect to see things by them with a royal seal and a coat of arms.

I have a much, much better idea and it's cheap. Let me run it. I would do a lot better job than either ICANN (ICAN'T) or the UN ever could. Given that most DNS servers cache, and therefore the actual throughput to replicate any top-level changes would be relatively low, I wouldn't need much more bandwidth than I already have.

(How much bandwidth do you need, when changes can take days to get anywhere? And how fast does the top-level domain change, anyway? I didn't know they added TLD extensions on a daily basis. Most of the actual domain names registered are registered with registrars lower down the heirarchy.)

If the DNS system switched from tree to grid, which it easily could and partially has, then a central administration system has nothing to do. Which is fine with me, if someone takes me seriously and gives me the job. Hey, I've no problem with world Governments paying me to do nothing, the way they do with Microsoft.

Re:Can United Nations REALLY stop cyber crime and

[dajak]

[..] none of those 13+ organizations you rattled off has been able to stop genocide in [..]

You never hear the small, positive stories. The media want to see blood. It sells.

Nothing happens unless there is a UN member or a coalition of UN members that has the means and the willingness to interfere. Other countries than the US do take on missions if they feel they have the means to pull it off.

What about France on the Ivory Coast? A quote:

"Without France, we would find ourselves in a second Rwanda," claimed Ibrahim Coulibaly, one of the rebels who took control of the north in September 2002, in an interview with Courrier International (Nov 17).

Or the UNMEE force in Ethiopia and Eritrea, where the Netherlands and Canada initially volunteered, but only after explicit assurances by the US through the media that they could call in US air support from bases in Saudi Arabia if needed. The force now mostly consists of troops from India, Jordania, and Kenya.

65,000 UN soldiers (excluding forces like the French one on the Ivory Coast) are currently serving in 16 UN operations worldwide, and most of those are succesful.

Srebrenica is a good example of what happens if you are willing but do not really have the means to pull it off yourself (and your 'ally' the US is secretly arming the side you are supposed to disarm according to your UN mandate). The Netherlands' force mistakenly assumed it could rely on air support by allies if needed, and the small force didn't have the means to take out Serbian tanks. The Serbs blocked munitions and arms supplies over the road for months before they attacked the enclave.

The US is the only country with a network of air force bases all over the world, and even the US would probably have had problems providing sufficient air lift and air support quickly in Rwanda. For smaller countries involvement in Rwanda could only have ended in embarassment.

All of this has hardly any bearing on the functioning of the UN bureaucracy. It is about cynical international diplomacy.