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Internet Power Struggle Reaching Climax
Fredden wrote to mention a BBC piece discussing the U.S.'s poor image when it comes to Internet management. From the article: "It has even lost the support of the European Union. It stands alone as the divisive battle over who runs the internet heads for a showdown at a key UN summit in Tunisia next month. The stakes are high, with the European Commissioner responsible for the net, Viviane Reding, warning of a potential web meltdown. " We've previously covered this story.
de.http://www.ibm.com/ not being the same as us.http://www.ibm.com/
That would be a giant PITA and would be like having the entire World use the NANP system of phone numbers yet each nation assigns them locally -- so 212 in the US would be NYC but not in the UK. It would probably also violate a ton of treaties related to trademarks and copyrights if anybody but IBM controlled that domain in Germany (per your example).
My suggestion (it will never happen) to solve this "problem" (I don't think there is one but the rest of the World seems to...) would be to get rid of the TLDs like .com, .net, .org, etc. and go back to the country code TLDs. Let every nation set their own policy for how they work. Then you could have .com.us, .com.uk, etc.
I've advocated this for years but there is no way in hell it would happen because of the saturation of .com.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
It doesn't matter what power the Department of Commerce exercises over ICANN. Neither body exercises any control over the root server operators. ICANN's output is purely advisory as far as the root servers are concerned. For that matter, the list of root servers is totally advisory. You, or any network, could decide to switch root systems at any time, for any reason.
If the DoC were to become heavy-handed with ICANN, the root server operators would probably not go along. The same would be true if the EU pretends they are in charge. Anybody can ride around saying "I am your King!", but the Internet is still an autonomous collective.