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

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.

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: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?