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. "
What good is it to have the xxx TLD if they won't enforce it? There will probably just be a rush to get their existing domain names as ADDITIONAL domain names before the squatters gobble them up.
.org but should be on a .com! :-)
Slashdot uses a
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
CANN'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.
Translate: They all look alike so we should give'em one domain.
Honestly, what the hell is this? It seems like this would be far more useful in Europe where most people speak another European language.
What is Asia? Is it from India to Japan? Just north-east Asia (Japan, China, Korea, and the smaller nations - which was my first guess)? South-east Asia too? Even in the limited area I can'ts eee the point: there is interest in each country in a neighboring language (I knew Korean nationals in the U.S. taking Japanese and many of the Japanese I know here in Japan know or are learning Chinese or Korean) but it's hardly wide spread.
ICANN is the king of dumb ideas and this is a solution looking for a problem.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
Our parents might be logging keyboard input and searching the logs. Yes, I know I'm paranoid.
[sig]
If ICANN wants to play down the influence of the US government, something that it could do is to provide rationale for what it is doing that come from a neutral and respected source. For example, the US Gov't says .xxx is bad. ICANN agrees. People are in uproar. ICANN then says *why* they agree with the US Gov't and state reasons that are neutrally-rooted as to why. For example, they can cite this thing by the IETF (on last check, a fairly neutral group, not tied with the US Gov't): http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3675.txt
Seriously, if the TLD structure is subject to influence from 6,000 "letters of concern" from the U.S. Christian Right, what is the message to the rest of the world? That's right - "you have every reason to be concerned about sole U.S. control of ICANN".
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Does anybody else find it as preposterous as do I, that to identify far eastern sites they want to use .asia which is a completely western-centric delineation and uses a western alphabet?
{ - Generic Guy - }
The end result being something like:
http://www.rush.group.eighties.progrock.band/
or something similarly inane, because ICANN can't seem to develop any self-control when it comes to TLDs. The whole idea behind DNS and TLDs was so people didn't have to remember to type in http://327.45.189.2/ all the time to get to their favorite web site. ICANN came along and took the original simple system and has been slowly obfuscating it to where pretty soon people will get Carpal Tunnel Syndrome just from typing in all these long names. Thank god for Google and bookmarks!
It's interesting to note that domains are starting to take on the character of USENET newsgroups as far as their length and complexity. Why not change the way domains are set up? Move the suffixes to prefixes:
http://org.slashdot.yro/articles/...
I like the flow, as it's basically a tree, saying the site belongs to an organization, it's name (on the web anyway) is slashdot, and you're in the section marked 'yro', subsection 'articles'. Like the Dewey Decimal System for web sites. Make it part of one big Net-wide reorg, along with IPv6.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
When does it end?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
you don't have to. in the city I live, there's a heerestraat, a heereweg, a heereplein, a verlengde heereweg. (all street names, meaning approximately: lord's street, lord's road, lord's plaza, lengthened lord's road). no company I know of buy property on heerestraat 2, heereplein 2, etc.
the web is no different: you only need 1 adress, the rest is pure choice. your choice.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
ICANN needs a Theory. The original TLD's (com/org/net/gov/mil/edu/int) had a pretty good theory that met the needs of the net at that time. Today those distinctions are less useful since .gov/.mil are U.S.-centric, .com has become the defacto standard that people expect, and there are many organizations which don't seem to fit the classification at all (e.g., personal-use domains might be one example). The ccTLD's (us/uk/jp, etc.) let individual countries have more autonomy, but it also semantically diluted the namespace (especially with opportunist looking for TLD's like .tv/.to).
I can't say what a good theory would be. Maybe the original TLD's could be cleaned up and administered better. Maybe the ccTLD's could be integrated with trademark law so that, e.g., foobar.jp means that Japan recognizes the owner of foobar's trademark. At any rate, the theory should have a few characterstics: it should be complete [cover all reasonable use cases]; it should be predictable [if I know of an organization or entity with a website, I should be able to predict the exact 1 TLD they exist in]; and it shouldn't require that most organizations feel obligated purchase multiple names to protect their trademark.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
Allow me to clarify this statement
If you're not taking orders from America, you're against us.
The current administration gets snippy with anyone who doesn't just summarily do what they think is best, or blindly nod their head and wag their tail.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
...or even about cultural diversity. Granted the british empire anglicized as much of the world as they could and it's been beneficial to their economy and the economy of their offshoot (america).
There are a whole lot of people who don't speak english in this world and as their economies grow and become technologically advanced they want to enjoy being able to do things in their own languages.
What is this if they don't do it in our language they are against us mentality?
Fine you guys came up with the internet the same way someone somewhere invented the wheel and so many other things that made it possible to get to where we as a human race are.
What is wrong with someone like me wanting to be able to compose an email in my native language, just because it's fun to use all those african proverbs or to even be able to advertise companies with native names (which include diacritical markings and so on) without having to code for each web browser.
I thought this whole internet thing was supposed to open our minds to what others have to offer.
And as per your implication that only anglophone countries can pay for goods, remember there was a world before britain or america, there'll still be one after they're long gone. The funny thing is that most people in the world don't hate america, in fact they love the success story that is america, but it's people like you that see a demon in every shadow that are turning more and more people toward the belief that americans are generally arrogant. And if you read or know anything about history you'll know that pride usually goes before a fall
Lose the attitude, boss, remember Rome, greece, egypt? they were great too....
All straight things must come to a bend
Of corse its poorly defined! The more you add to this the more complicated it is going to get. In short people are never going to be happy. Some people will want things to be more specific while others would prefer a broad definition. Do we split things up by type? (.com, .org, .net)
do we split things up by country? (.us, .uk, .cn)
Do we split things up by continent? (.euro, .asia, .africa)
a combination? (.us.com)
The trick is to be able to regulate when enough is enough. To regulate when you have steped over the boundries of being fair or ludacris. I would rather not have to have every domain look like this: xyz.na.us.il.com
Reality is a big nasty dragon. Fortunately I don't believe in dragons.
Creating .Asia without creating .Europe , .Africa , .NAmerica , .SAmerica , .Australia (and .Antarctica ) is insanity, and shows that ICANN is a gang of hacks. They can't even pull off geopolitical favoritism and apologies without underscoring their orientation along those lines. Preferential treatment of a subgroup is just as bigoted as opposition, just as "racism" means bias with respect to race, regardless of whether positive/negative. But then, what to expect from a gang which compensates for letting the US override consensus for .xxx by throwing a few parties?
I miss Jon Postel.
--
make install -not war
Who was responsible for most of the fundamental mathematics behind modern computing? Alan Turing - English.
Where was the first stored-program computer built? University of Manchester - England
Who invented the WWW? Tim Berners-Lee - England.
Who wrote the Linux TCP/IP stack? Alan Cox - Welsh
Is any of this relevant? No. Not to mention the fact that a large number of the fundamental protocols used by the Internet are a result of the IETF process, with international researchers contributing.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
How would the DNS resolver know when to stop?