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EU Domain Registries & ICANN
rob_levine writes "Following on from the announcement a few weeks ago that the U.S. Department Of Commerce intends to retain control of the Internet's root domain servers (originally to be relinquished in 2006), several EU domain registries are preparing to build, test and install a system to prevent U.S. government meddling, according to this article in The Register.
Could this be the beginning of the end of the centralised autocracy that is ICANN?"
People laugh at this, but what you know as the "World Wide Web" was a term and a concept dreamt up by.... wait for it.... Al Gore.
I don't know where you get your information, but the WWW, both the term and the concept, was developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989. The Internet, of course, is far older than that. Gore came up with the term "information superhighway."
You could make the argument that it was never intended to be under global control, but the Internet was a global network well before the World Wide Web came along.
This process is called decolonization ... It started for the USA with the Boston tea party, wanting independency from UK. And now the registrars are doing with their own kind of tea party, building their own root server, and wanting independency from the US, although in a different and in a much more peacefull way.
The 'Internet' is a network of networks, and exists only because of the peering and routing agreements of those who own the networks.
Therefore, to say the internet is 'owned' by anyone is a fallacy. Before people start getting jingoistic, no one country has a monopoly on the internet, just portions thereof. And since the protocols are open, it's not unreasonable to expect that if the US did start monkeying around with the DNS servers, then they would find their routes disappearing, leaving them with their very own intranet.
Corporate interests being what they are, I doubt it would happen.
It's only centralised if you think the US is the centre of the world.
And you should find out the real answer to your own question about who has put in most of the money to fund the Internet as it's developed today. When you've worked that out, you'll start to understand why so many people think the US government and its ICANN subsidiary don't deserve their de facto overlord status.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.