Slashdot Mirror
ICANN Plays Down U.S. Influence
aychamo writes "The ICANN (the company that distributes most of the world's internet addresses) is denying that it gives the US government too much control over its operations. For instance, the US was the only country able to stop ICANN from using .xxx for pr0n domains, instead of .com. The ICANN is planning events to show that it is not US influenced." From the article: "ICANN's board of directors appears to favor a proposal for a new set of Internet addresses that end in .Asia, which would more easily identify Asia-focused Web sites. Approval of the new top-level domain could come during the ICANN board of directors meeting on Sunday. One other major development this week involves progress toward allowing the use of non-English language characters when steering a Web browser to a particular site. ICANN is now exploring a proposal to open Web browsers up to dozens of the world's other alphabets. Actual tests of just such a system are now in the works, Twomey said. "
Another article (or its comments) says they are going to enforce it, or at least give the sites a time to change domain before they would fine XXX .com sites. I doubt that would ever work, though.
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is denying that it gives the US government too much control over its operations.
ICANN seems to forget some things, it is wholy supported by the US government on US soil. The UN does not contribute a red cent to it's operations.
I would not underestimate the US influence, but nor do I fear it.
Slashdot is a major centre of hacker culture. pr0n is traditional hacker usage, going back at the very least to the days of B1FF. It's basically an ethnic variant spelling.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Even in the introductory paragraph, we can see that there is some confusion here.
And yet...
So, the US doesn't have much control over its operations, and yet it was the only country that was able to step in and strike down an ICANN resolution. Isn't this kind of like saying "1 + 1 = 2, but 1 + 1 = 3"?
Green's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
What about universities in other countries? Governments? Militaries?
.asia is a lame idea, but the problem of admitting other alphabets is very non-trivial and of great value.
The existing tld system works just fine for this, we just don't use ".us" much in this country so it isn't as apparent. For instance, the city of Los Angeles website is "www.ci.la.ca.us" rather than "los-angeles.gov," much the same way Imperial College is ic.ac.uk or Stellenbosch University is sun.ac.za or the Australian Football league is afl.com.au.
Each country code tld is controlled by the country thus assigned and they can do what they want with it. This is a non-problem and one that makes the whole "ICANN controls the world" argument laughable. People are just needlessly obsessed with the handful of overused and often misused tlds like com, org and net. However, I agree,
Which is why they are using Unicode to implement IDNs (encoded as ASCII-coded "Punycode"-compressed data on the wire); the incompatibility problems you are talking about are related to old 8-bit encodings.
Isn't it possible to abuse UTF-8 domain names for activities such as cybersquatting? It's easy to mistake www.microsöft.com for www.microsoft.com.
It's worse than that. For example: there are several characters in the Cyrillic script which look exactly like Roman characters, like C, K, O, P, M, H... But of course they have different Unicode character values. So a malicious individual could register microsoft.com using a blend of Roman and Cyrillic characters, and it would look completely undistinguishable from the real thing. There are a number of ways to protect against that, but none of them are particularly good.
Who invented the world wide web? Tim Berniers-Lee - An Englishman working at CERN in Switzerland (Thats Europe for all you Americans)