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. "

Comments

What good is it without enforcement

[Monoman]

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.

Slashdot uses a .org but should be on a .com! :-)

Re:What good is it without enforcement

[Bogtha]

What good is it to have the xxx TLD if they won't enforce it?

Pornographers, who make far more money from adults with credit cards than kids, can choose to be filtered out more easily from kids, thus wasting a lot less bandwidth on the kids who can't pay for anything anyway.

People often demonise pornographers as though their sole purpose in life is to corrupt innocent children. That's nonsense, of course, they care about the bottom line as much as any company.

Re:What good is it without enforcement

[tehwebguy]

then why don't they take cases to court when people share passwords, spread files via p2p, etc? they know that it has a hook as good as a drug for some/most people. someone might not be a paying customer today or tomorrow, but once it is hard to find what they want via p2p they might become one..

or when they turn 18..

or when they get a credit card..

or when they find their parents' credit card..

Re:What good is it without enforcement

[JasonKChapman]

After say, two years, why not just refuse to resolve pr0n .com sites? The two years gives the pr0n sites plenty of time to migrate over.

Oh, good. So who gets to decide what is pr0n and what isn't? I suspect Saudi Arabia, The Netherlands, and China, as examples, would all give you radically different definitions. Hell, New York and Alabama would give you radically different definitions. Would there be an ICANN Decency Board? Would they "know it when they saw it," or would they spend a few years trying to define it objectively?

So what other categories of speech should be forcibly banned from the .com realm? Hmmm? Should the next discussion be about .politics or .religion?

Reasons not to do .xxx

[code65536]

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

Why does the rest of the world object?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

The U.S. government is only trying to protect the children. (CNet story about Bush admin putting a halt to .xxx TLD)

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".

.Asia?

[Generic Guy]

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?

Re:Oh great. More TLDs = more $$ from my pocket

[radja]

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.

ICANN needs a Theory

[firewrought]

Seriously, why does ICANN keep coming up with proposals for TLD's like .travel and .asia? This is not a useful ontological breakdown for organizing the world's organizations. It's like going into your local library and finding that the books are divided into three sections: Anvils, Horseys, and Everything Else.

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.

Re:Inventions and politics

[TheRaven64]

Who built the first calculating machine? Charles Babbage - English.
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.