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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. "
I think every 80s progrock supergroup should have their own TLD.
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
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.
From the article: "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."
.com, .gov, .edu etc. domains with .us. That at least makes it fair for the rest of the world. What's the point of .asia btw? just keep using .cn.
So... if I understand correctly, the closer people are to the USA, the easier their domain names will be. Compare:
XYZ.com -> US company
XYZ.co.uk -> UK company
XYZ.co.cn.asia -> Chinese company
What about universities in other countries? Governments? Militaries?
ICANN: Start getting a little bit international, postfix all
What's so dumb about the idea? ICANN creates the TLD. Website visitors and owners then decide for themselves what is "Asian" and what is not.
.com, a lot of .com sites are not commercial. The de facto meaning of .com is determined freely and organicly by the masses of operators and visitors, and the ICANN specs only provide something of a suggested meaning. I think that the same can work here to great effect.
If you look at
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
When your Continental Pride results in less traffic to Ninglenongle.asia than it did to the original, KoreanGameCompany.com, you'll just have to compensate by taking out bigger, longer, more expository ads on the *.com sites. Works for me. Or maybe you'll need multiple sites, one from which to promote your product and make money, and others through which your political correctness and cultural diversity may be flaunted. All Good, as far as our Western tech economy resurgence is concerned.
Vive le Difference! or something...
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
If you're not with America, you're against us.
//too subtle?
"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."
Immediately after the denial, however, they added, "But please don't tell the government we said that."
Today ICANN announced that they would create a ".arab" top level domain name, to reassure the world that they were not overly influenced by the US government. "We think a .arab domain name would allow arabs to more easily identify arab focused web sites, and demonstrates that at ICANN we don't just focus on the US, but also we try to accomodate less significant countries, like Europe, Canada and Arab places like Iraq." The spokesman added "I'm sure it will also help the fight against terrorism".
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.
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 - }
and it should not be .xxx or .com but .cum
No sig for now.
My criticism is that .asia would be a poorly defined TLD. There are many opinions about what constitutes "asia" - is Australia included? how about Israel? what about eastern Russia?
.com may be poorly policed but that's a different issue: perhaps ICANN needs to learn lessons about how to hand out TLDs. The new .eu seems to be allocated with a little more caution as we speak.
.us for a start. Should .asia sites have country.asia? like .cn.asia? if so should US companies have .com.us.[continent - I guess .na?] ?
The existing
Also I think the hierarchy of domains needs to be sorted out. It would be a lot easier if all USA based sites used
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.
When does it end?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
What good is it to have the xxx TLD if they won't enforce it?
.xxx domains. Suppose you enter a .com domain and the site also has a .xxx domain. Follow all redirections until the site doesn't redirect anymore. You lookup the host name and get an IP. Then replace .com with .xxx, and lookup. Is it the same IP? Censor the other domain, or the IP. Ta-da.
.xxx domains are now used. A conservative senator launches a proposal ENFORCING the now voluntary use of .xxx domains. It gets approved.
.xxx domain?
An intelligent filter COULD be used for sites that do use
Also, let's position ourselves in the near feature, 5 years from now.
But how could such proposal be approved if no pr0n website has a
The problem with rejecting some measures because they're "not good enough" is stupidity. Not stepping forward is stepping backwards.
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.
Why not move all US-based sites to the .www domain (Wild Wild West). It will make just as much sense as creating .asia for the "Asians". What about creating .east and .west domain and hand out every Web surfer a compass?
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
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.
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
Who invented the world wide web? Tim Berniers-Lee - An Englishman working at CERN in Switzerland (Thats Europe for all you Americans)
...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
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
Ok, I'm really missing this argument.
.xxx. (as well as have the .org's and .net's enforced)
.xxx domain, then make them move.
.xxx" in every host file I ever see ;)
I'm a Christian, very right wing. Also, as sysadmin. I know most righters are against this but I don't really see why.
I would love to have a single TLD to block. I would love to see the original domain rules enforced, and have the XXX sites forced on to
Someone tell me what the other righters argument is. This isn't going to create MORE xxx sites. I think all porn sites should be given first rights to their equivelent
Then I put "127.0.0.1
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
When international TLDs ".christian", ".jewish" and ".mormons" were proposed, received feedback made ICANN to deploy also ".asian-religions", ".african-religions" ".native-indian-religions" to represent worldwide view. It was rumoured, that a call from Saudi Arabia's prince and trade officials of some government made ICANN to enforce additional sub-TLD ".islam.arabs".
Damn them! I must now petition for ".cthulhu-cult"
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.